…as usual…
I am kind of curious to why he thinks java and its supporters will just kind of disapear now because Microsoft and Sun will be working together?
“While some people think this means Microsoft will bundle Java again, I think that Microsoft will choose to pursue their own .NET Java (J#), instead.”
Why in the world would they do that??? They already have C#! Unless I am missing something (likely), that has to be one of the most assine predictions I have ever heard.
In my opinion, the 1.5 billion dollars doesn’t change much, except gives Java a lot more chance of exposure than it had before. I think this guy just wants to kiss Microsoft’s ass while pretending to be a typical hater.
Cringely has always had an odd attitude to Java. He’s been pretty consistently negative over the years I seem to recall.
In case anyone didn’t know, Cringely doesn’t exist.
The cringely columns are written by a series of stringers. Cringely is a trademark, not a person. Kind of like “Perry Rohdan” in trashy sci fi. (There is no Perry Rohdan, the publisher owns the name and contracts out the books.)
Myself I refuse to have debates with mythical figures. Or at least I do now, ever since Mickey Mouse cleaned my clock 
Hehe, then I it amusing how the string of Cringely’s have all managed to convey an odd attitude towards java =p
You know, while I’ve heard that on occasion from Jeff, I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere else. Is this a known fact, or a personal belief?
I personally like Cringely. Much of his stuff is good reading, and he seems to get things right much more often than he gets things wrong.
Jeff is right, but there’s more to the story than that. I read a wired article about the guy ages ago, which I can’t find the link to now (of course). Probably read it in print.
Basically “Robert X Cringely” was the name given by infoworld (I think), to an imaginary person who got the blame for things going wrong. Then one month they were short a page in the magazine, and decided to use the name for a ghost written commentary. Different people wrote as Cringely until a guy called Mark Stevens took over and used that name for a number of years, built up a bit of a rep, made it successful and so on.
He then left infoworld (or was fired), there was a whole lot of acrimonious shit, and they ended up suing each other, or he sued them, or they sued him, who the hell knows. Someone sued someone, anyway. In the end, he’s allowed to use “Robert X Cringely” and compworld use “Robert Cringely”, I believe. The infoworld column is ghost written by whoever, and the pbs “I, Cringely” commentary is written by Mark Stevens, who is the same guy who hosted the TV show “Revenge of the Nerds”.
EDIT: Bugger, should’ve googled better. Found the link in 2 seconds:
(which just goes to show that wired shouldn’t bother using their own search engine).
Cool, thanks for the details. I love trivia like that!
JK
By the way, the Cringley POV is not really all th at surpising. Its consistant with how they’ve always handled precitions.
They always go for what appears to be the “safe money” bet. And in ANYTHING in the computer industry, iunfortunately, the safe money bet is MSFT wil lwin.
Sometimes they lose and when they lose they lose big, but I’m afraid its more often that they don’t. Thats the reality if you are just blindly playing the odds.
I bet if you looked back in history you can find a Cringley colum about how MSFT “blackbird” was gonna destroy HTML and web servers!
[quote]I bet if you looked back in history you can find a Cringley colum about how MSFT “blackbird” was gonna destroy HTML and web servers!
[/quote]
I don’t know about a Cringely column on Blackbird but there were certainly plenty of others. Another case where Microsoft backed the wrong horse would be SVG (for which they still have minimal support). Hey, does anyone remember Cairo?