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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Sun's Jonathan Schwartz Takes on Longhorn
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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SG: Notes and Groove creator Ray Ozzie says he's very excited about Longhorn " particularly its validation of Groove innovations in peer-to-peer and XML now baked in to the operating system.
Schwartz: That's a dangerous thing though. The fact that they're baking those things into the OS means that they don't need Ray's product.
SG: He sees the opportunity to build apps on top of that infrastructure.
Schwartz: No company has ever monetized Microsoft's infrastructure in the history of Microsoft.
Hmmm. You can extend that line of reasoning. What should and should not be shipped bundled with the OS? Networking? GUI Shell? File System? The answers to these questions change over time; they are different now than they were 10 years ago. The fact that Scwartz seems to not get that isn't a good thing for a supposed visionary. He goes on with this:
Schwartz: Java clearly presents an environment architected for networked delivery of code. Unlike the Windows environment, our assumption Day One was that we needed to build a network platform -- not a single destination platform -- one that assumed that code couldn't be malicious, that everyone would in fact have malicious intent " and therefore would have to be protected not only from others, but from themselves.
SG: You're saying Longhorn represents Windows getting to where you already are?
Schwartz: I think Longhorn represents an attempt to rearchitect Windows to achieve the same attributes that we have with Java. By the time they deliver, the danger they may face is that they've improved upon a problem space for which the marketplace has already identified alternate solutions.
Oh, you mean the market embraced Java for client side apps? Which planet does this guy live on? Java mostly lives on the server - it's been a roaring success there, but it's failed on the client for the same reason that our product, VisualWorks didn't get that much traction on the desktop - end users really, really want apps to look and feel the same. We are addressing this by moving towards Pollock - which will ultimately yield native widget interfaces in a cross platform fashion. Schwartz still hasn't figured out something I learned a long time ago - people don't want a portable LCD interface.
Read the rest of the article as well - I think Schwartz is off in la la land. He has a whole riff on how the Java phones are (and will continue to be) more popular than the MS SmartPhones - apparently, he's forgotten all about the whole Palm/WinCE thing. I wouldn't bet against MS on the SmartPhone; that's why it's one of the platforms we intend to support soon.
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