Why is the "Java Technology Concept Map"

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

In case you haven’t seen this pretty cool map here’s the link:
http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/new2java/javamap/intro.html

from the lead story on http://java.sun.com/
I’ve seen it before, I guess it came out awhile ago, but not that I see it again I just have to ask?

Why isn’t it in Java instead of Flash?
Personally this always annoys me when I see Java web interactive promotional material done in Flash rather than Java. I mean, maybe Flash is the best tech for the job, but if Java can do it similiarly, it just seems like good promotional policy to use Java to promote Java.

#2

Although I’d always prefer the best tool for the job, I think you’ve got a very good point - it’s a fundemental rule of promotion and evangelism that you use your tool everywhere. You don’t tend to see MS using Zeus for websites just because it’s faster, more efficient, cheaper to run and more secure; instead they eat their own dogfood (and when they don’t, they get egg on their face).

There seems to be a common pattern in Sun’s marketing group that they don’t do what seems smart to us normal people (c.f. recent Desktop Java naming fiasco, c.f. 1.2 == 2 < 1.4 < 5 == 1.5 numbering fiasco, etc etc).

#3

I think blahblahblah may have said before (but I’m not sure) that sun has a lot of money, and they don’t want to use too much of their money to help java out. Is this why I don’t see any java related commercials? I’ve seens m$ commercials promoting their software, but why doesn’t sun do the same thing with java when they also have huge sums of money. Java could get much more popular, and used more widely by users of most operating systems, this is a great thing, since theres a huge amount of people not just using windows, but using linux, unix, macOSX, etc… Why doesn’t sun run with java?

#4

Incidentally, IBM made the same mistake when competing with MS (whilst also partnering with them) back in 1995. They lost out so much over 5 years that they totally revamped their marketing, and nowadays do a lot more marketing direct to consumers (although as recently as 2001 I saw an old fogey very senior in IBM’s hard-drives division who said publically “we don’t care about consumers. Consumers don’t buy hard-disks”. Dumb-ass (NB: superficially, this seems to be true; but in fact, consumers end up making or influencing a lot of the purchasing decisions made by corporates, especially in the SME sector; on top of that, consumer purchasing of hard-disks has been growing where corporate sales haven’t, so it would seem especially stupid to ignore the consumers, let along tell them you don’t care about them!))