Microsoft is a lot like a venomous snake. I wouldn’t want to stand to close to it, but I also feel a sort of awe at just how vicious and predatory it can be.
After being forced into a settlement with Sun over the way Microsoft was using and abusing Java, Microsoft recently told Sun to take its ball and go home — Microsoft is pulling Java support out of Windows and Internet Explorer (note this doesn’t mean anything for Javascript which is completely different from Java).
This is a brilliant call. With Internet Explorer being the dominant browser, this will help turn web developers off of Java. As Purdue University professor of computer science Jan Vitek tells ZDNet, “if you want your Web page accessible to the largest number of people, you may want to drop Java.”
And it’s going to be extremely difficult to make a case that Microsoft is trying to kill Java since Sun itself has been whining for years about how Microsoft implemented Java (in fact Sun’s press releases almost sound like they’d prefer that Java not be included in Windows).
Of course, Microsoft also takes the chance to give Java a little kick over security (conveniently forgetting to mention that Java’s problems pale in comparison to ActiveX).
Microsoft has turned brutal competition into such an art, that I suspect someday insurance policies might be updated so that they will no longer cover “an Act of Microsoft.”