Wednesday 18 July, 2001
Microsoft hits back at Sun Microsystems by abandoning Java in its latest system
The world's biggest software company, Microsoft, is abandoning one of the most popular computer languages on the internet, Sun Microsystem's Java.
It will not be including Java software language on its next generation of Windows.
Microsoft's London product manager for development tools, Gavin King explains the reasons behind the decision:
"Microsoft are not actually abandoning Java as such, but under the terms and agreements of a settlement with Sun Microsystems earlier this year we are actually quite constricted about our further advancement and development of our own personal implementation of the Java virtual machine.
"The announcement we made to remove Microsoft’s implementation of the virtual machine from the windows XP platform is just a simplification of our implementation of that agreement with Sun Microsystems."
The agreement between Sun and Microsoft followed a lawsuit where Sun alleged that Microsoft violated the terms of an 1996 agreement by creating a Windows-only version of Java that was incompatible with other software.
The lawsuit was settled in January, with Microsoft agreeing it would no longer license current or new versions of Java from Sun.
It could however distribute products using outdated version of the Java technology for seven years under the agreement. It also paid Sun $20m and was barred from using Sun's Java compatible trademark.
Professional industry analyst Paul Quigley believes there was an element of revenge in the decision to exclude Java from Windows XP:
"I think it probably is, even though it was an implied revenge attack rather than explicit - of course it would not be possible for them to do that.
"This is effectively Microsoft demonstrating that they can be as competitive as the next man by stripping back to basics what they do best.
"Everything that they are going to be purveying is going to be a Microsoft product rather than a Sun Microsystems or an AOL type product."
This decision could turn out to be an own-goal by Microsoft.
Java has become an integral part of the internet system, a vital component in commercial as well as private online software packages.
In short, almost everyone uses Java. By abandoning it, Microsoft appears likely to inconvenience and even alienate many of its customers.
Gavin King denies that this is the case:
"We are not actually stopping customers from using other third party implementations of the Java virtual machine from IBM or even Sun for example. Under those terms and conditions, we are just not able to advance our personal Microsoft Java virtual machine any further.
"What we are actually doing is just removing it from the windows platform but we are not stopping anyone installing a third parties platform implementation or indeed downloading our own implementation direct from the web."
| "Microsoft is effectively demonstrating that they can be as competitive as the next man by stripping back to basics what they do best." Paul Quigley | |
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