Form the thread: "Eric Lippert @ericlippert · Sep 23 Great point. Sun's strategy for Java has always struck me as weird. They sold expensive hardware, so why b

Form the thread: "Eric Lippert @ericlippert · Sep 23 Great point. Sun's strategy for Java has always struck me as weird. They sold expensive hardware, so why build a language whose selling point was that it commoditizes hardware? A write-once-run-anywhere strategy accelerates ability to move off their expensive hardware." TLDR: In their mind they were commoditizing the OS, not the hardware I think the reasoning at the time was Microsoft was using the desktop to eat into the server market, while the PC hardware ecosystem was standardizing and commoditizing the hardware. Sun's business structure based on high ticket item sales was in trouble. They had no chance taking on the desktop OS, so I guess they believed commoditizing the OS on the next layer up was the game to play. Remember their "an OS is just a bag of drivers" spiel? Once the OS would be abstracted away they could then make hardware specific for the JVM. They started giving out those "Javastations" to university CS labs, where they usually sat collecting dust on top of a cupboard as they had no upside to a "normal" desktop computer and lots of downsides. So in their vision everything was written in Java, and run on a JVM which made the lowest common abstraction owned by Sun, not Microsoft. It is also why they were so hostile to any attempt at leaking from the abstraction. Java on Windows could not be more functional than Java on other OS'es My take was that the bright Sun future was near free lightweight Javastations on the desk with datacenters crammed full of expensive Sun hardware (not uncommon in those days) running the "real" computations.