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October 8, 1997

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Technology and Its Discontents


Yesterday's developments in the struggle between Sun and Microsoft attest that competition over information technology is unlike any other. It's not enough to achieve the greatest market share, nor even to satisfy your customers with the best products, says the conventional wisdom. You must also control the technology that underlies them.

The logic is straightforward, as Jesse Berst describes it. Control the architecture and the key APIs, and you've got your customers hooked. Let them be controlled by someone else, and all the marketing in the world won't save you. Debates over whose control is good, bad, dictatorial or democratic are entertaining, but they risk forgetting that customers are technology's ultimate beneficiaries.

As Jim Barksdale warned at this week's Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando (see the PCWeek article), the recent mudslinging could "confuse the market" over the issue of Java compliance. This confusion would be a disservice to customers and to developers, and play squarely into Microsoft's Java strategy. Ironically, it's exactly the kind of scenario a unified Java platform is designed to avoid.

Everybody wants to be a winner in this war, but the consequences must be measured. The longer the battles endure, the less universal the Java platform may become.


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