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Story: Will Longhorn outflank Java rivals?

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Outflank? Oh, Pul-eeze! By a series of interesting and quirky accidents, MS-DOS became the default operating system on PCs, and everything since then has been market inertia. "Outflank" implies there is some strategy involved, and there is not, or rather, none other than repackgeing. DOS was bits and pieces (largely CP/M) taken from other sources, Windows originally (and for 9x, still is) a DOS shell with a GUI taken from Xerox PARC, WinNT is OS/2 2.1 (itself from the Carnegie-Mellon microkernel ) with the kludegy Windows GUI and hidden in-house-use API calls, etc. etc. etc. Now Longhorn is the Redmond take (take being the operative word here) on J2EE. Same old strategy - copy and de-commoditize.

Will it "outsell" Java? Quite probably - it's always easier to stay within your current framework rather than leap into the unknown, and the majority of managers prefer safety in the short-term rather than leaner-and-meaner in the long term. But don't promote the idea that just because Redmond has the most copies out there implies any technological superiority. That's a version of "all rich people are smart", which, if you know any rich folks, is not a safe assumption by any means. It's more correct to say "All rich people are lucky". Mr. Gates is a very lucky man, but lucky doesn't write the code.

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