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Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

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Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#101

Post by pjmlp »

maveonair wrote: post #53
ryanmccullagh wrote: post #24

Oracle 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 recomm…

I 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/06891213...

In 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.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#102

Post by AtlasBarfed »

wayeq wrote: post #28
mccorrinall wrote: post #6

Javabeans give me nightmares too

I still don't understand what they are.

Basically 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.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#103

Post by pototo666 »

irrational wrote: post #83
pototo666 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What if they use typescript/Vue? I work for a fortune 100 company that uses Vue. We have found that people familiar with react can pick up Vue very quickly. That hardly seems like a reason to ask for more money.

I will accept the job. React and Vue are not that different.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#104

Post by return_to_monke »

bitcharmer wrote: post #96
resonious wrote: post #30

> 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 relevan…

> It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people This is the most misinformed take on what Java is used for I have seen on HN. Today Java is used by FAANG and other tech shops. It's employed in the enterprise, science and finance. What it is almost never used for is creating "cool web pages"

I was also puzzled by this one. Does he mean Java applets maybe?

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#105

Post by pjmlp »

Beltalowda wrote: post #70
ryanmccullagh wrote: post #24

Oracle 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 recomm…

Sun's business model was selling hardware: beefy workstations that you do Serious Computing™ with, unlike those wimpy home computers like PCs.[1] Later on, when x86 actually became decent and competitive they shifted to server hardware, but still: monetary units for hardware, not software. And oh yeah, with this hardware you also got this SunOS Unix thingy. SunOS was very much core to Sun's success especially in the…

In fact, something that newer generations might miss out is that Sun was the first UNIX vendor to create the separation of user and developer SKUs, which other UNIX vendors were rather quick to adopt.

It was this split of the UNIX SDK into a separate commercial package that eventually fuelled the GCC contributions, until then largely ignored.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#106

Post by debarshri »

The 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.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#107

Post by matusp »

shmerl wrote: post #38
grecy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow. Losing sleep becasue progress might actually happen in the operating systems space I mean, any business owner should be watching out for rising competitive threats and thinking about how to nullify them. Unfortunately for us that means the big players are trying hard to stifle the innovators....

The point is that he is worrying here not about improving their own things to compete, but about barrier for entry being low which means fast progress. Gatekeeping is bad, business owners or not. Strategy to nullify competition instead of competing is disgusting and damaging to progress and market itself.

Is there a strategy to nullify competition in the mails? They simply stated that they are worried about the coming competition, which is completely normal for any business.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#109

Post by aliswe »

pjmlp wrote: post #13

And 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.

the what factory?

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#110

Post by pjmlp »

nequo wrote: post #15
CottonMcKnight wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "make the web totally OS agnostic"? Clutches pearls how will Microsoft control the web if any old operating system is allowed to access it!?

This 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.

In 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.

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