15 ms·
Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)
- Fatnino 4y ago(1996)
- dang 4y agoAdded. Thanks!
- ChrisArchitect 4y agoNot only that but this content is from a year ago (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29812712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29812712
- jabza_ 4y agoWriting this from an Android device
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 131hn 4y agoAndroid is what Gates had foreseen back then. I find his nightmare pretty relevant
- college_physics 4y agoSurprised this point not realized or discussed more in this thread. Android is famously claimed by linux fans but for all practical purposes its a Java device which factually made this technology among the most impactful on the planet.
- pjmlp 4y agoI was using Java on Symbian devices already, Blackberry was JavaSE based, and if it wasn't for how Google ripped off Sun, I would probably be using a SavaJe OS device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SavaJe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SavaJe
- hamilton987 4y ago[dead]
- jensensbutton 4y ago> I think that the risk of Sun really taking the OS franchise away from us is much lower than the risk that they cheapen the entire business. Spot on.
- mccorrinall 4y agoJavabeans give me nightmares too
- tluyben2 4y agoMy first successful company sold EJBs. It was a nice hype; simple to get into and go from sitting in your underwear in the attic to 10s of millions of revenue and contracts and sitting at Fortune 1000 corps with the cto. And of course learning (me as a university student and geek still) rapidly that enterprise software is not about software but about process, support, sla, contracts, consultancy (we went from 400 devs to 400 IT consultants in an afternoon ugh), continuity, XML and communication.
- rawoke083600 4y ago>that enterprise software is not about software but about process, True that ! NOTHING moves as slow as a B2B software contract, it can take 6+months and even sometimes years to go from proof-of-concept and golf-talks to actual first invoice being paid to you the provider.
- wayeq 4y agoI still don't understand what they are.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoBasically data objects loaded via orm, with code to repersist to database when updated. ... except there was a long road of transactions, distributed architecture issues, etc still to hammer out, and these were the days of a gig of ram maybe and no ssds, and 100 base t if you were lucky. And jit was a wip. So it was a app server with its own dedicated mumbo jumbo for everything to dazzle CEOs.
- ulkesh 4y agoAnd in my day, if I recall correctly, it took a good dozen or so XML files to describe and configure a single EJB. Thanks, JOnAS. I still have hate in my heart. And now ORM in Java (with JPA) is a simple @Entity. Ahh, the warm, cozy feeling of abstraction.
- invalidname 4y agoI don't like it when people focus on grammar too much but "I am worry..."?
- nequo 4y agoI thought that somebody retyped the original and introduced the typos. But it looks like the typos were present in the original too: http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/010807/PLEX_5803.pdf http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/010807/PLEX...
- nostromo 4y agoIt’s a Silicon Valley pro-tip: spelling and grammatical mistakes are signs that you’re super busy or too rich to care. There’s a few famous VCs that are apparently too busy to ever capitalize a letter... Too busy to shift!
- mccorrinall 4y agoOr maybe they write on an iphone. I had to turn auto capitalization off because it would capitalize emoticons after a full stop: turning xD into Xd
- prmoustache 4y agoHow does it prevent one to put caps manually? I too have disabled mose auto-things on my smartphone yet I use caps. It is not a technical proble, it is about decency and respect.
- Beltalowda 4y agoExample from the same site: https://www.techemails.com/p/sergey-brin-irate-call-from-steve-jobs https://www.techemails.com/p/sergey-brin-irate-call-from-ste... Personally, I'd struggle to not capitalize things. It's just automatic. I do believe there was a bit of a fashion to not capitalize things for a while too; I remember some people doing it on the interwebz.
- agnosticmantis 4y ago
- shmerl 4y ago> it seems like it could make it easy for people to do competitive operating systems. Wow. Losing sleep becasue progress might actually happen in the operating systems space. How very '90s Microsoft.
- CottonMcKnight 4y agoAlso, "make the web totally OS agnostic"? Clutches pearls how will Microsoft control the web if any old operating system is allowed to access it!?
- pjmlp 4y agoBy making everyone install their own browser, including shipping applications with the whole browser alongside the application. /s
- nequo 4y agoThis did end up happening though (although not so much due to Java as to JavaScript etc.). It was important for Microsoft to anticipate this and pivot from relying too much on Windows on the desktop. And they tried pivoting left and right with the Xbox, Azure, .NET, their early tablets (which Steve Jobs famously discounted because they needed a stylus) and so on.
- pjmlp 4y agoIn fact, one of the reasons Windows is getting so messed up is that everyone that cares about their career is now on those business units, with Azure playing the role of "Cloud OS". Leaving Windows to younger generations without background on why things are the way they are, and feel like they need to rewrite everything to leave their mark.
- deschutes 4y agoWait until you see what Apple has been at for the last 15 years.
- 4y ago
- hinkley 4y agoI still have a JavaOne tshirt in the back of my closet that says, In a World Without Fences, Who Needs Gates?
- jbverschoor 4y agoThere was a tombstone of Gates during hackers in progress (hip97) iirc. Shows you how much he and windows was loved. Today’s microsoft is forced to play nice.
- kragen 4y agogithub just removed git: urls from their web ui so it no longer tells you how to make a clone you can push from using standard git it's been replaced with instructions for using their own gh cli tool (which, however, is also free software) for example on any github project page, https://github.com/username/projectname https://github.com/username/projectname, click on the "code ↓" button in the top right; the "local" tab on the left has a "clone" tab with 'https' and 'github cli' subtabs. the git@github.com: url you can use with standard git has been removed i think this is a change within the last month embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well
- Scaevolus 4y agoYou have to be logged into github for the SSH clone tab to appear-- if they don't know your pubkey you can't connect using the SSH protocol. Git can push over HTTPS, too.
- pjmlp 4y agoAnd nowadays they are an OpenJDK contributor, were part of the companies doing the ARM port, and develop Java support for VSCode in collaboration with Red-Hat. Meanwhile the chocolate factory has created their own version of ".NET" for phones.
- eddsh1994 4y ago> Virtual worlds could be such a thing Haha, Metaverse talk while Zuckerberg was in preschool
- snickerbockers 4y agoI hate how "metaverse" became such a mainstream word in the last couple of years but 99% of the population has never even heard of Snow Crash, which originated the term.
- faefox 4y agoOh man, VR and metaverse-style concepts were big in the 90s even if the technology obviously wasn't quite there yet. Active Worlds predated Second Life by several years and surprisingly enough is still online to this day.
- jansan 4y agoThat is fascinating and deserves its own HN thread.
- squarefoot 4y agoI recall watching on TV a VR demo with sensor gloves connected to a Mac where the demonstrator would grab and manipulate objects in 3D. That was in the mid-80s.
- antod 4y agoI remember VRML going nowhere fast.
- irrational 4y agoI read a book on vrml back in the 90s and was convinced it was going to be huge.
- giantrobot 4y agoVRML was a technology that was way ahead of its time. Hardware of the time just could not deliver a good experience with it. Even high end SGI hardware (the land of VRML's birth) struggled with it. By the time commodity hardware got to the point it could deliver, interest and support of VRML was long expired. Contrast VRML to a game like Quake. One of the key optimizations in Quake was a very computationally expensive pre-processing of the game map to determine surface visibility. The map environment was also a simplified set or surfaces rather than a giant tree of arbitrary primitives. VRML had almost the opposite Design leaving the client to do a ton of work just to construct the usable representation of the virtual environment and then figure out what to draw. It also didn't help the client software often had terrible UIs and were implemented as browser plugins.
- htag 4y agoWhy was the "extinguish" step in "embrace and extend" left out?
- kortilla 4y agoBecause it’s never “extinguish” from the “extender’s” perspective. They extended it and scooped up all the customers, mission accomplished.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI think the first 2 e's actually did predate extinguish
- kyle-rb 4y agoBecause that looks really bad if the email is made public as a result of a court case, like this one was.
- weberer 4y agoThey just used EE internally. "Extinguish" was added by the someone suing them and the media.
- legitster 4y ago> New things are NEVER a threat to the old world as soon as people say. Look at the mainframe vs PC. It has taken us TWO DECADES and even after all that IBM still has billions in mainframe revenue. Cool new technology always expands rapidly into NEW areas (where there is a vacuum). Pundits always say that this is going to kill the old businesses - eventually that happens but not anywhere near as soon as they say.
- brundolf 4y agoThis has been my gut feeling about the new AI technologies we've seen recently. We'll see what happens
- mikro2nd 4y agoAmara's Law: "We overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term. We under estimate its impact in the long term."
- Beltalowda 4y agoThere's a tendency to overestimate things, but not so sure about the underestimate part. Unless I missed something I don't think there are many people running NoSQL databases on Itanium processors with GNU Hurd powering their XSLT/Xforms website. (NoSQL is still useful, but it didn't "replace SQL" as promised, and the others have completely failed in spite of promising much). It's always hard to predict the future; often the first iteration of something new isn't very good or even downright bad, and it's not easy to predict if it will ever be any good. I remember trying Rust somewhere in the early 2010s "before it was cool" and I hit some bug in the installation (would eat up all my memory). Then I tried the new version that fixed it and I ran in to problems actually compiling programs due to another bug. This doesn't reflect the status of Rust today at all, but back then it was essentially impossible for me to tell if it would always remain the buggy mess it was then, or if it would be able to put itself together and become stable. There's been plenty of buggy things that never became stable (Itanium, Hurd).
- ryanmccullagh 4y agoOracle had already acquired Sun by the time I was in the technology industry. The respondent states that Sun is so set on giving things away. Can someone comment on the culture of Sun at that time? Sun seems to have left a legacy in the open source community. What was the business logic on giving away the software for free? I know it's very common today, but Sun may have been a leader in open source. Any books recommendations would be appreciated too.
- maveonair 4y agoI can recommend the book “Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing”. The Author compares NeXT a lot with Sun including their business strategies. I have never thought I will learn so much about the early days of Sun by reading this book. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/0689121350 https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/06891213...
- hbogert 4y agoHaving listened to "oxide and friends" and "on the metal" podcasts.. next and sun were nothing alike. The above podcasts are hosted by Bryan cantrill and often has guests from that era, though the newer episodes try not to reminisce so much, because it became a bit much at some point
- maveonair 4y agoTotally agree, which is the reason why I recommend the book. The author explains the difference in a great detail and by that you learn so much about Sun. …and NeXT or course :).
- pjmlp 4y agoIn a way they got to be interwined via the OpenStep and Objective-C collaboration projects, that ironically are in the genesis of Java and also Java EE, hence why Java has so many Objective-C touch points.
- ioblomov 4y ago
- PeterHolzwarth 4y agoFilfre.net / The Digital Antiquarian has a two-part (and ongoing) series of articles on this era in regards to web browsers and the perceived threat of Java to Microsoft (specifically, the idea that was floating around that users could have access to all the software tools they need via a browser and JAVA: no need for MS tools or software, etc). https://www.filfre.net/2022/12/doing-windows-part-11-the-internet-tidal-wave/ https://www.filfre.net/2022/12/doing-windows-part-11-the-int... https://www.filfre.net/2022/12/doing-windows-part-12-david-and-goliath/ https://www.filfre.net/2022/12/doing-windows-part-12-david-a...
- resonious 4y ago> First, the excitement is overblown - at least from a business perspective. At the moment Java is expanding into a vacuum. It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people. It gives programmers something new to learn, book people something new to sell books on, software tool companies a way to issue new development tools etc. This is a pretty interesting take, and it feels relevant to this day with respect to both frontend and backend frameworks. I always thought of frameworks as just fads where people simply enjoy to try new ideas and are just having fun. I've always agreed with the overall sentiment that, for example, no one will be going out of business just because their frontend isn't React, but it's interesting to consider that people also profit off of these "fads" by selling books and tools, resulting in a sort of perpetual motion machine.
- jbverschoor 4y agoHe’s right.. this is what BASIC used to be
- pototo666 4y ago> no one will be going out of business just because their frontend isn't React Yes. But one is more likely to go out of business if their frontend is still using JQuery. It's harder to maintain and iterate, harder to recruite good engineers. I would ask for more money if the company hiring me uses JQuery and doesn't use TypeScript/React. And if the company somehow hires me, I would be less productive because I can't use TypeScript and a modern framework.
- midhhhthrow 4y agoI’ll take jquery over react any day of the week and ask for less money because it’s more productive
- sngz 4y agoGlad I'm not the only one that thinks this
- 4y ago
- dmarchand90 4y agoI had never heard of Nathan Myhrvold before, but, his lucid descriptions of the nature of technology has me convinced he's a genius. Incredibile career he's had. Went to the best schools, published in top scientific journals in multiple foods. And, he took a leave of absence as Microsoft CTO (around when these emails were written) to go to chef school in France. He even has cookbooks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold
- leeoniya 4y agoand then became an infamous patent troll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
- nh23423fefe 4y agoModernist Cuisine was very popular back in 2011, that was my introduction to him.
- weberer 4y agoAnd then what happened next: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/sun-microsoft-settle-java-suit/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/sun-microsoft-settle...
- cm2187 4y agoHas anyone ever used the cross platform capability of java? Java is cross platform in the way c is cross platform, you can compile to many target platforms. But aren't pretty much all java applications intended to run on one specific platform only? Developers like the idea of cross platform but they pretty much never use it. I think javascript is the only language that is truly used in a cross platform way.
- ridruejo 4y agoIt was (and is) very common to develop on a Windows desktop / laptop and deploy to a Linux server
- cm2187 4y agoExactly, that's the "c is cross platform" way. What java offers is that you compile once and you can run the same binaries on any platform (hence freely switching OS as Bill Gates feared). But who uses that in real life? Because compiling on windows and deploying on linux/unix/etc, that was posssible 20 years before java in c/c++.
- Beltalowda 4y ago> Because compiling on windows and deploying on linux/unix/etc, that was posssible 20 years before java in c/c++. "20 years before Java"? That's 1975 we're talking about. Was it possible to build a program on Windows 95/NT and then deploy that to a Unix system? Probably. But given that today this can still be quite a pain to cross-compile C code I bet it wasn't easy. Besides, "it compiles" doesn't mean "it works" or "it works on this other platform" (quite likely with a different CPU architecture), especially not in C. And few people were writing any tests in the 90s. Java abstracted a lot of details like endianness, platform-specific APIs, etc. away. > who uses that in real life? There's quite a few cross-platform Java desktop apps; the IntelliJ IDEs are a good example (although they've since developed Kotlin, it's still the same Java VM). DBeaver is another example, openoffice.org used quite a bit of Java back in the day (although I think that's mostly phased out now) – I'm sure there are more. And of course in the 90s you had Java Web Applets. Java is a bit less popular for this than it was, but I've run plenty of Java programs on my FreeBSD machine back in the day, and I'm pretty sure "FreeBSD" wasn't really something the developers really thought of when they wrote it (I can't remember which off-hand, it was a long time ago but I have "fond" memories of dealing with the manual installation bruhhaha because of the license at the time).
- black_puppydog 4y agoI loved this part. It's not new but nicely put: > As you and know very well, this sort of widespread interest can become a self fullfilling phenomenon, because programmer attention creates programs. Some of these will be successful and that only fuels more participation in the phenomenon. I hope this is what's happening with Rust. :) I also thought this paragraph just afterwards had an interesting point: > In the limit, they can make the web totally OS agnostic - but there will still be other things that motivate one platform versus another. This looks like it happened; but did/do people actually credit Sun for this? On the client side it was Netscape that broke MS' monopoly with Internet Explorer, but on the server side Java was and is still very popular with the business folks, so... does Nathan have a point here?
- irrational 4y ago> it was Netscape that broke MS' monopoly with Internet Explorer What do you mean by this? We used Netscape Navigator for quite a while before trying a version of IE.
- josephd79 4y agoYes, Netscape took them to court, proved monopoly by then it was too late. Microsoft had already took over. Bundled IE with Windows (it was first an add on) and added a deal with Apple to include it in their OS. It was Chrome that tore it down. Which was a good thing and a bad thing.
- irrational 4y agoFrom my recollection, it was Firefox that broke the IE stranglehold and then later Google released Chrome.
- Beltalowda 4y ago> On the client side it was Netscape that broke MS' monopoly with Internet Explorer What? Microsoft completely obliterated Netscape, which was dominant before IE. In the early 2000s IE had like ~95% market share. Later Mozilla Firefox turned that around, but only after they made the steaming pile of shit that was Netscape vaguely decent, which took a few years.
- habibur 4y agoNathan Myhrvold's long answer was more interesting. He was talking about the future of the Internet and what would make money. Now 25 years later, watch what's actually made the most money, and did his reply cover those. I can think of hosted services and search. Even Microsoft had one of the very first maps online in the 90s [ terraserver ] but they failed to realize how large this business eventually will turn into.
- giantrobot 4y agoI loved playing with Terraserver back in the day. However it was built to be a demo rather than a product. Their GIS products were Streets & Trips and then MapPoint which then rolled into an online version that went through various MSN/Live/Bing rebrands. I don't think that Microsoft failed to realize how large a business mapping would become. I think the problem was mostly these products existed in the Ballmer era where Microsoft expanded into seemingly every niche without clear goals besides using up all the oxygen in the room.
- debarshri 4y agoThe best take away in that mail is > Cool new technology always expands rapidly into NEW areas (where there is a vacuum). We often hear startups with mission to kill and goliath company slow moving slow. The email shows how it is actually impossible to do that and you have to create a market to grow.
- suction 4y ago[dead]
- tannhaeuser 4y agoFolks underestimate the important role Java had in saving open systems and Unix, and then enabling Linux on the server side. Around 1996, Windows already was the platform of choice for most new projects on the server side, after totally dominating the client side (desktop).
- bayesian_horse 4y agoNow he is losing sleep over toilets. I'd call that progress.
- mrblampo 4y agoThis was super interesting, and it would seem Bill Gates absolutely predicted the effect that not Java, but ultimately interactive web apps in a broad sense would come to have by making it less important to have one operating system or another. Interesting that the reply mostly implied that there wasn't much reason to worry, and that the future and dominance of web apps was still uncertain. But we are reading this email exchange now I think largely because of how well placed Bill Gates's worries were. I wonder how many technologies he and other executives lost sleep over that did not amount to anything in the long run.
- rusticpenn 4y agoThe reply was on point and serious . Mainframe still exists and generates billions in revenue. Windows/ Microsoft lost their foothold in a new market. However Microsoft is also transforming into a cloud first company.
- dmarchand90 4y agoAlso the reply gives reasonable time estimates: 20 years. I think this is about right as web apps clear dominance wouldn't be until roughly the mid 2010s anyway
- pjmlp 4y agoWell the cloud is the new mainframe, hence why "Azure OS" is the new Windows.
- rusticpenn 4y agoCloud is not the new mainframe. Maybe in 15 years.
- pjmlp 4y agoIt surely is from the point of view of timesharing and thin clients, and I am not sure if I wouldn't rather use JCL instead of YAML.
- smcl 4y ago> The new Java applications are NOT credible threats to traditional PC software any time soon Well, Nathan was right there. But even with Java as (depending on where you look) 2nd, 3rd or 4th popular programming language, how many of those applications are being run on Windows hardware? Developed maybe, but deployed? Ultimately Microsoft didn't get stung too badly by this, since they embraced Linux on the server but it's weird to see them talking about how it's "expanding into a vaccuum" so early, batting around what to do about it when we know now that ultimately Windows lost that battle. > Continue to "embrace and extend" - both at the level of new Java tools (like J++), and our broader browser strategy. Kind of an "Oh my god, he admit it!" moment, it's wild to remember how open they were on the EEE strategy.
- kaba0 4y agoWell, if you look at how much .NET is used on Windows, they sort of prevented a java overtake by their own java-clone.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bravura 4y agoI am fascinated no one has commented on the last point of Myhrvolds reply, which was prescient and seemingly ignored. It was almost like a playbook for what MacOS did. The tldr: We must not lose Windows on Desktop. To do so: 1) have the best audio and video tools and multimedia experience 2) we should be bug-free and boot fast 3) we should solve desktop storage with transparent cloud storage It’s funny this omen explains exactly one way they took their ears off the ball and lost the desktop, their core business. This email wasn’t just about the web as an os, but also the end user desktop experience.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoA friendly reminder that what CEOs of large corporation focus on is often against the best interest of the user. I had the same feeling reading one of Andy Grove's books. He treated everything I perceived as positive for the customer (such as commoditization of hardware, rise of thin clients etc.) as a threat. If history taught me anything it is that this attitude is not history.
- kaba0 4y agoWell, big companies are just paperclip optimizers without any moral feelings. Moral looking actions are just calculated profit-maximizings (e.g. putting out a rainbow flag will likely have better profits long term than not doing so in case of user-facing companies).
- rvieira 4y ago> "In the limit, they can make the web totally OS agnostic [...]" A good thing, surely.
- unsafecast 4y agoNot for them :)
- rffn 4y agoYes, too much coffee causes sleep issues. He got over it though.
- bradhe 4y agoIt’s interesting how the tone and culture of corporate email hasn’t changed in (almost) 30 years. Change Java for some other technology and I feel like I could have gotten that email in my inbox today.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoNathan Myhrvold answer is extremely impressive. There is a lot of extremely accurate forecasting in this email from the cheapening of the value of the OS to his extremely interesting idea about storing files on the internet with the File API which is more or less Dropbox before Dropbox. Reading that you realise how wrong a choice it was to put Ballmer in charge and how much it cost Microsoft.
- homeland221 4y agoHe didnt figure out the concept of online subscription and ads. It shows he wasnt that revolutionary. Just lucky, born at the right time to the right family and lived in right neighborhood/country.