just like everything else they’ve ever done, microsoft reverse engineered java, broke their contract with sun, threw them out of the house, renamed everything, and claimed they invented it.
windows nt is clearly was an unholy comingling of windows, ibm os2, dec vms and unix, sans attribution, thank you very much, but I remember the days, not so long ago, we were working with them then, when microsoft actually considered not using sockets for network communication. the only question was, if they could get away with it, and isolate unix, but that was a non-starter, so they glommed on their networking software, I don’t know if you remember the nt days, when it was a weird hodgepodge of netware, netbeui, tcp/ip, and so on. maybe it really wasn’t so clear to them, I remember debates about token-ring versus ethernet, like who really cares at that level?
but the point is that for microsoft, it was never about the technology, it was about how far can they go, very carefully thinking it out, very consciously, boxing you into a corner, so from your point of view, you start out easy, and every choice is made for you down the road, leading you to give more and more of your money to *guess who*
(you being the non-tech-savvy-but-with-money-to-spend victim, for whom the profile is pasted to a bulletin board…)
its no accident they’re so successful, you know.
but the thing that kills me, and it happed (yet again) just the other day, when engineers, who should know better, are brainwashed, and they don’t even know it.
I was talking to a co-worker, and I pointed out how .net was a ripoff of java (and just try to tell me it wasn’t!), and someone overheard me, and said, “well, not so much” or something to that effect. I apologized, since I hadn’t even been talking to him, and said I didn’t mean to be confrontational, and he just kind of trailed off, and mumbled not to anyone in particular, “I think they did it better, anyway…”
putting aside some disturbing aspects of that personal interaction, I would expect more from a technical expert. I suspect he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. maybe inside the .net box, he has a certain level of mastery, but outside the box,… well, what I would say is that one should have the courage to just come out and say, “yes, they reverse engineered java, and they made it their own, and they made it better,” but not deny it but spouting the half-truth that is microsoft’s corporate position.
all that proved to me is that a certain party may be smart, but nonetheless is capable of being brainwashed.