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Microsoft internal email about Java
URL: Internal MS letter about Java
At 12:31 PM on Feb 3, 2007, Andy Tripp
wrote:
Fresh Jobs for Developers Post a job opportunity
Of particular interest to Java developers is this one from the Visual J++ Product Manager, which says:
Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language.
and:
...it would give us some idea of how much time we have to work with in killing Sun's Java.
I realize this is "old news" about MS trying to kill and/or steal Java. But what I'm wondering is whether the people who feel that MS is "just another company doing everything it can to make money" don't see a line being crossed here. Do many companies talk internally about stealing their competitors' technology? Would you work at a company where people seem to talk about killing and stealing competitors' products?
68 replies so far (
Post your own)
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
Do many companies talk internally about stealing their competitors' technology?Did Gosling talk about stealing the technology of C++ and Smalltalk? Did Apple steal Xerox Parc technology? Does everybody steal "ideas" (which is what you're really talking about) from everybody else? Yeah, that's how the world works.
Amazing that it's 2007 and some people are still whining about this.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
You don't get it. Ok, it's a fact that Gosling borrowed ideas from C++, Smalltalk etc. However, did he ever write an internal email talking about stealing or killing another company's product?Don't miss the point.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
> You don't get it. Ok, it's a fact that Gosling> borrowed ideas from C++, Smalltalk etc. However, did
> he ever write an internal email talking about
> stealing or killing another company's product?
> Don't miss the point.
Oh I get it alright. I get that Any Tripp is whining about something that competitors do all the time. Who cares about random emails. Let's see all the emails that Sun employees have ever wrote about its competitors.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
Considering that M$ has been operating as a monopoly for a number of years, any comparison to simply borrowing of ideas to create what one might consider a "better" product is simply not applicable. M$, in these emails, simply shows its resolve to destroy anything that is not M$, REGARDLESS of technical merit. It's nothing short of a world-conquest game; one must wonder if they spent too much time playing Risk as kids.Gosling borrowed from C++ and from Smalltalk, and did so quite openly. He did so because C++ and Smalltalk both had great ideas, worthy of emulation, but they also had what Gosling considered fatal weaknesses. M$'s motivation for creating .NET and C# is in these emails shown to be nothing of the sort. No technical issues are really raised here; it's nothing but Marketing.
And, that, is a whole different kettle of fish.
When marketers get a hold of your products, run... And .NET ended up being a failure because it was entirely driven by marketers. If you doubt that .NET is a failure (and C# an even bigger one), just look at the numbers: the only .NET programmers out there are those who were doing VB6 before. M$ has not succeeded in bringing in any new converts. So .NET is an improvement for those who were stuck in the dark ages of VB6, but adds no value whatsoever to those of us who had already moved beyond it. And the .NET world is currently extremely busy catching up to the java community, with projects like Ant.NET, Spring.NET, Hibernate.NET and iBATIS.NET. There's a hell of a lot of Java-envy amongst the Redmond crowd...
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
To quote a favourite show, this mail is "outrageous, egregious and preposterous". I'm not too surprised by the sentiment (we all knew or suspected) but I'm surprised by the tone. Very arrogant, very presumptuous. It's theirs -- we'll just "steal it".Andrew
p.s. I also don't get why ppl are so down on cross platform? I switched all my desktops from XP to Linux recently (rather than move to Vista) and found that the java apps I depend upon (JabRef, Alloy analyser, eclipse, etc) all work flawlessly. My own stuff works well also. In my real job, we've moved many server-side programs from windows to linux. I just don't understand what the problem is with cross platform. I realise you need to do extra testing, but at least it's very close.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
> Considering that M$ has been operating as a monopoly...Oops, you just used M$. You lose.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
Fact is that Java is probably the most grandiose success story when it comes to cross-platformability ever conceived.Imitation is the most sincerest form of flattery. They drooled then, maybe they're still drooling now. But then they never wanted multiplatformability to begin with. Hence the COM extensions in J--.
O well, they buried the hatchet with like 2 billion dollars in cash, equipment, and services.
As for "stealing", it'd be nice if there was some evidence they might have "stolen", say, some open source GPL code. It might be needed to fend off some future attacks from them. Apparently Ballmer (monkey boy) has been yacking how anyone using Linux might see a lawsuit come their way, or you or your customers might get intimidated by it at least, - unless you use Novell Suse Linux, whom they just signed a deal with.
Now *that* is disgusting, never mind that email.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
> Do many companies talk internally about stealing> their competitors' technology?
>
> Did Gosling talk about stealing the technology of C++
> and Smalltalk?
No, he didn't talk about stealing C++. If you think he did, please provide a link.
Clearly there's a big difference between using something as a starting point, and actually "stealing" it. I'm sure that Gosling would not characterize what he did as "stealing" C++.
> Did Apple steal Xerox Parc
> technology?
No, not really. Parc had no product, no patents or trademarks.
> Does everybody steal "ideas" (which is
> what you're really talking about) from everybody
> else? Yeah, that's how the world works.
Well, that's the real question...are they just talking about "stealing" ideas, or something more? We all know what MS actually did with J++, and that was something more...more than just what Gosling did with C++ and what Apple did with the mouse and GUI.
>
> Amazing that it's 2007 and some people are still
> whining about this.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
But it's the irony of those remarks that's more interesting. The guy who made those remarks used to work for Sun as a Java Evangelist. Here's an old bio I found.http://www.informit.com/authors/bio.asp?a=70dc6907-4166-4e14-9191-be35e9c23960&rl=1
Here is a more updated version that looks to be self written.
http://www.devhood.com/public.aspx?user_id=00011A774C850ABD
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
It's sort of funny to read these emails because the notions seem so ancient. I think time has told us that portability and cross platform was and still is a really important thing. But, portability has been more or less solved, and the industry has moved on.Even so, these emails serve as an interesting historical record into the culture of MS at the time, and represent a really big inflection point at MS. These emails do show a lot of arrogance on MS part back then. I believe that arrogance was what made them trip up and loose their way as noted later in the email by Jim Allchin. What started out as a Java killer morphed into the pancea to what ails MS at the time (ie security problems, linux, open source, etc). It was the arrogance that fueled them to just keep lumping more solutions into .NET until .NET became this massively ambitious undertaking that couldn't possibly be delievered. They diluted it to the point no one knew what was the point. And, MS hung their future on it big time. In the end it was just too big a change for them.
Another example of how arrogance has it's price.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
Stealing is not the right word but definitely keeping a keen eye on the competitor and replicating stuff.Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
Oh I think we get it.The difference is that there is no real difference between 'borrowing technology' and stealing it, in this instance. The real difference is that MS executives are too stupid to refer to it as 'borrowing' in their internal email messages.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
It is actually a rather old story, and a known mail. The strategy, at the time, was to kill crossplatformnes of Java at any cost, and included adding extensions to the language, and paying some of "neutral" IDE providers to support MS Java exclusively. Sun got their big paycheck for all of that mess few years ago. What developers got, is a complete mess, and a lesson learned to trust their eyes, not what MS is sayingAs for Xerox Parc story, there were some extreme stupidities from Xerox upper management, however, MS is not actually clear on that one too. MS was actually working FOR Apple in implementing what Bill and Jobs found very attractive new paradigm, and what Xerox actually gave them all of documentation for free.
Keep in mind that Xerox was a prototype, and had to be squeezed into personal computers of that time, so it was a lot of hard work and clever programming (as opposed to MS just signing a contract with Sun, getting Java code, and slapping some extensions on top of it). Bill actually screwed Steve then too, working with him and in parallel with him, taking some of Steve's best programmers, and releasing Windows on market before Mac (some of it is Steve's fault, that guy always strives for perfection, Bill is more "first-to-market at any cost" person).
MS actually did similar things to IBM, on several occasions. Not to mention smaller players.
They are just that type of a company. Those companies are all over the place, MS is just what we see because it is in our profession.
Aside for some of that practices breaking the law (for that part MS usually pays big bucks when caught), and being immoral (who cares for that in capitalism, right
So yes, most companies are "evil" and predatory in their nature, but when that characteristics can be tracked and personalized to the most prominent leaders, I'm off. They could have the best technology in Universe, and could became the most user/programmer/competition friendly company on Earth, I still wouldn't consider them. But that's just me, that kind of people disturb me deeply (especially because my brother had Hodgkins). As I've said, its for each one to decide on their own.
Re: Microsoft internal email about Java
deleted doublepost