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Let me add, my understanding of the 2 major things people complained about at the time are (1) extending Java with access to OLE/COM/DCOM (2) extending IE with

by gernb 4y ago

Let me add, my understanding of the 2 major things people complained about at the time are (1) extending Java with access to OLE/COM/DCOM (2) extending IE with ActiveX (which is OLE/COM/DCOM access in the browser). It's always seemed like to me like both of those as the natural thing to do as an engineer. Microsoft and Windows users had 1000s and 1000s of OLE/COM/DCOM libraries. A new system/language appears and gets popular. You want to use all you existing software and solutions with this new system/language. So you find a way to make them interop. It requires zero malice to decide to do this. Irregardless of if it benefits your company it is arguably the most common sense and natural thing nearly any engineer would do.

wrs 4y ago
There’s no contradiction here. Both things are true. The engineers at MS thought Java was a great idea, and built a world-class implementation team for it. Of course they added P/Invoke (easy DLL native code integration) and COM interop because that’s naturally what you need in the Windows environment. There was plenty of enthusiasm for Java in the MS engineering community. From MS’s business perspective, that was also great for the 3-E strategy, and more Windows-specific features were encouraged. From Sun’s business perspective, that went totally against the cross-platform Java strategy and was grounds for war. The business folks had a major falling-out, and the same MS engineering team, now legally prevented from working on Java, built a better Java (CLR) for Windows software with the lessons learned. The real disconnect on the engineering side was that the MS engineers thought of Java as just another language they could implement and improve on (like C), whereas Sun engineers thought of Java as a world-changing initiative where the WORA abstraction layer was paramount. Source: I was there.

by gernb 4y ago

wrs 4y ago

There’s no contradiction here. Both things are true. The engineers at MS thought Java was a great idea, and built a world-class implementation team for it. Of course they added P/Invoke (easy DLL native code integration) and COM interop because that’s naturally what you need in the Windows environment. There was plenty of enthusiasm for Java in the MS engineering community. From MS’s business perspective, that was also great for the 3-E strategy, and more Windows-specific features were encouraged. From Sun’s business perspective, that went totally against the cross-platform Java strategy and was grounds for war. The business folks had a major falling-out, and the same MS engineering team, now legally prevented from working on Java, built a better Java (CLR) for Windows software with the lessons learned. The real disconnect on the engineering side was that the MS engineers thought of Java as just another language they could implement and improve on (like C), whereas Sun engineers thought of Java as a world-changing initiative where the WORA abstraction layer was paramount. Source: I was there.