Tuesday, June 18, 2002

VS.NET Command Window 4:36:22 PM • • comment [] • Google It! If I could take this moment to issue a gentle nudge without seeming ungrateful, where's Cassini? And I'm still mourning the integrated command shell from Saturn, which is IMHO the feature of Emacs that I use the most, bar none, and one of the main reasons I don't use VS.NET yet as my main development environment. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] Are you referring to "View -> Other Windows -> Command Window" ?

Strategy Letter V 1:28:51 AM • • comment [] • Google It! Joel On Software writes an interesting article (go ahead and read it if you haven't already). I agree with most of if. However, he then goes on to say this about Sun: Sun's enthusiasm for WORA is, um, strange, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last thing they want to do. I'd like to mention here a couple of issues Joel seems to ignore. Sun is an enterprise company. It makes money by selling high-performance, high-cost, non-compatible hardware to large corporations. When Sun decided that Java is the best thing since sliced bread and tried to sell that to the rest of the world, it pushed it as a client-side (desktop and downwards) solution -- nobody at that time was thinking of enterprise servers running Java. It's only when Java failed on the desktop that Sun turned its sights on the server side. The computer market today is not exactly the model for microeconomics. (I'll trend lightly here, because I'm not very strong on economics.) We have a market whose size is pretty much pre-determined, and where the number of players is very small. The result is that you can't really grow much by selling to new customers entering the field. You grow by enlarging your market share at the expense of others. Taken together, I think that Sun's strategy circa 1995 was: "Let's cut off Microsoft's desktop air supply". Sun wanted to push BOTH cheap hardware AND cheap operating systems on the desktop (by using Java) so as to choke Microsoft. The brilliance of the scheme is that by pushing for thinner and thinner desktop machines, clients would need bigger and bigger servers, thus making Sun twice as happy. Thus Sun's other attempt -- the network computers. The strategy did not work as well as Sun wanted it to. As of this time, Java has not made any dent in the desktop arena. Microsoft still makes a lot of money selling OS licenses. On the server side, Sun has ironically created a market gap through which two companies (better than Sun at selling software and services to the enterprise) have entered Sun's arena -- IBM and BAE. (Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft. All opinions here are my own, however, and do not necessarily reflect those of Microsoft.)

© Copyright 2002 Ziv Caspi.