At the 32 minute mark it comes to a head where Gates is reading a 3 line mail for a while, rocking back and forth. The email written by Gates read: "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do, to undermine Sun".
Prior to that document being produced in the video, Gates spent a good 10 minutes or so on the arguing the use of the words, "competitive threat" and "undermine" and so forth.
Gates also admitted to speaking directly with Steve Jobs on the phone. This was clearly anti-competitive behaviour.
The next line of questioning then goes into pedantic details about Microsoft's discussions with Apple and the same game continues.
There is no law, implied, explicit, or otherwise that suggests CEOs of competing companies can't, or even shouldn't talk with each other.
While there are many areas that are off limits to competitors (setting price levels, dividing markets, reducing supply) - there are lots of valid reasons for competitors to communicate on a regular basis around issues like standards, purchasing agreements, licensing agreements, etc...
I'm sure that Boo-Keun Yoon (CEO of Samsung) and Tim Cook have frequent conversations trying to settle their differences.
As per the email, the phone call (which in itself cannot be proved but more matter is shared later on when Microsoft CFO/Treasurer met with Jobs and other documents came to light).
How does this differ from what Google did with Android, effectively leading to "Java apps that can only run on Android"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google
Sun settled with Microsoft before a verdict was reached, so the question of IP and if alternate implementations of a language syntax is allowed wasn't answered then.
In the antitrust suit, all that was answered was that Microsoft used its advantage with its operating system monopoly to push its version of the Java runtime. The effect was that Microsoft were not allowed to bundle their runtime, but had to offer users the choice - they were not found to be violating Sun's IP in implementing a runtime.
Syntax of a programming language not being IP protected is probably a good thing for developers, regardless of what you think of the Microsoft situation. The API being protected is a separate issue, as is the trademark on the name (which applied in the Microsoft case but not in Google's since they didn't use the trademark term in their implementation)
"If Sun doesn't want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language - or - 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way"
http://www.fosspatents.com/2011/07/judge-orders-overhaul-of-...
One wonders how much better the world would be if Google had hired some first employees that preferred expressive languages.
But in the case you cited, the API was found to be not protected (which is also the proper ruling in my opinion).
Microsoft was a Java licensee, and Sun claimed the license required them to implement the standardized Java interface. Sun sued over the license and antitrust issues.
Google isn't a Java licensee. Oracle sued over copyright issues.
Although adding ReSharper to the party doesn't hurt.
Is it simply better language features ( typing, generics, etc.?), or does the argument also include .NET and the CLR?
Will Microsoft open up development on unix systems (not mono)? I've interpreted signals from the CEO as an indication this could happen. What about visual studio?
Ah, and then there's still the inferior, type erasure based generics. There is nothing on par with C#'s awesome async-await. There's no yield return semantics (when used properly, you can create very clean and robust code thanks to it). You've got to deal with the infamous checked exceptions (I think it's the consensus these days that this wasn't such a good design choice after all). No single-root type system (so you've got Integers and ints, and the latter aren't objects) etc. And there's more, even little things like var keyword or partial classes that don't exist in Java (like many language features, partial classes can be used for evil, but it's very helpful for dealing with autogenerated code). Operator overloading. Nasty and weird syntax for annotations (in compare to C#'s attributes).
Some of these can be a matter of taste for sure and I'm not interested in language flamewars :) I write both Java and C# for living, just personally I prefer the latter.
It would be real big if Microsoft purchased Xamarin and made it free (or much cheaper). They've really gained momentum in recent time and it feels like they are getting recognition from MS now.
C# feels like Java done right. Many of Java's shortcomings can be masked with a great IDE (making setters and getters) nobrainers - but I prefer C#.
Take a look at this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/omervk/scala-for-c-developers
It draws some parallels between C# and Scala.
C# the language is superior in essentially every way to Java. Far less code = less bugs. F# takes it up another notch, while allowing you to keep interop.
Microsoft has had plenty of opportunity to officially support Mono, but they have not. Their patent promise only extends to Mono as long as you don't run into other issues with Microsoft. If MS wanted, they could, at any time, start really supporting Mono and work to unify runtimes. But anything's possible.
By that measure, APL programs must be the least buggy in existence.
I'm not sure if K generalizes well. It may be that plenty of software has edge cases that must be handled that don't have any elegant representations. I have a hard time believing such little code can actually work that well. But it seems impressive enough that I plan on learning it some and making sure I'm not massively missing out on something because it seems foreign.
From my own experience, less code certainly means less bugs. Even with denser code. Simply having to jump around to find stuff (due to more lines) seems to cause more problems
From this perspective, just factoring out imperative code into a named subroutine becomes a pain point because it adds new symbolic content - a new name, things being passed in, things being returned, things that were in scope suddenly falling outside of it. It is no longer an "organization tool" - you can add a level of block scope and a comment for that instead, and navigate the resulting large functions with code folding. And classes - well, classes become something to avoid!
APL style simply moves this concept down to the per-character level of thought and advocates additional care towards certain measures of readability. "It is more likely," says the APL programmer, "that you will see a typo in a 2 character name than in a 10 character name." The language aids in this process by providing tools that drastically condense common operations and encouraging their use as the default.
I just hit a major bug due to that kind of thing, where stuff wasn't clear due to messy size of the code (customer insisted on C#). If the relevant sections had been sitting on screen, then I most likely would have noticed or never even made it in first place.
I also started working with a new hire, one that isn't an FP proponent, and I'm shocked at the variable names. Even iterating a list of entry objects: I'd naturally write the list as 'es', and the current item 'e'. Versus 'entriesToProcess' and 'current entry'. Or even 'entries' and 'ent'.
People's objections there seem to be that 'entries' is more readable than 'es'. While that may be true in isolation, I'm not sure it matters when working on a codebase above a few hundred lines. The amount if context is likely to be high enough that you're not going to be plucking one line out for changing, and the local context (and typing) should make it apparent it's a plural of e.g. entries, not employees.
It's also vb.net, f# and so much else. Even node.js is integrated now! In short, it's a very adaptable IDE (with a lot of features also).
But it isn't Windows anymore since Owin.
What's also nice is that they are innovating the platform for integrations with popular (opensource) like features. Eg. The scaffolding of Rails got integrated into Asp.Net MVC in it's own way. NodeJS selfhostable option is adapted into .Net as "Owin". SignalR is their realtime component, you got live IDE features when developing webapps (it uses SignalR in the background)
It's kinda a mix of "all worlds" :)
To MS's credit, .NET did aim to be a true multi language runtime, back to Project 7. They got feedback from many people to make sure many languages could be accommodated (looks like they've since given up on this goal). Ironically, the JVM, with it's strictly less capable VM, boasts far more languages targeting it's runtime. Probably because Microsoft worked against releasing it for other platforms and is still a bit standoffish.
This is not true. C# got functional features thanks to the work of Erik Meijer and his team.
His paper "Confessions of a used programming language salesman" about this work, is very well known in the compiler design community.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.118....
Yeah, LINQ was what got enterprise developers slowly started into the FP world.
According to Don Syme's blog posts, certain "product team members" said that "generics is for academics only." However, he did not name Anders Hejlsberg as being one of them.
Here's the blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2011/03/15/10141602.as...
Also see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2012/07/05/more-c-net-...
Also see the story from the other side: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/scottwil/archive/2007/10/24/working-...
I wonder if MSR's implementation of generics in .NET 2.0 was why F# got bundled into Visual Studio as a first-class language. IronPython, IronRuby, etc. never got that type of internal buy-in and got spun-off instead.
I've no real clue why F# was productized, but I'd like to think it was because MS realized it has to stay competitive. F# is probably the most advanced language with that level of tooling, support, libraries, etc. I know F# is the only reason I continue to target the CLR. At the same time, MS's F# support certainly feels like it's just lip service, even while their flagship language lacks basics like a REPL. (I know, Roslyn will cure all.) I've yet to see any marketing suggesting F# would be a better choice for many projects; only esoteric sciencey and maths usages see suggested.
What'd really be forward would be for MS to support Rust or a project like that. (I believe they hired the guy behind BitC but I don't think it was for language design.)
After joining Microsoft, Hejlsberg led the company’s efforts in Visual J++
[...]
Hejlsberg helped make Visual J++ the most popular
and most productive Java IDE in the late '90s.
Java also seems nonsensical for Sun. How were they supposed to make money off it? Especially as a hardware company, it seems a bit odd to target all platforms. And in the end, how could Microsoft not buy Sun for a measly $2BN?
The incentive for Sun probably was in part that they wanted their high end workstations to stay relevant and maybe eventually develop cpu's that accelerated java execution.
The concept of run anywhere, from a code execution standpoint, is fine. That doesn't preclude using platform specific APIs to make the application better. Like using C# but targeting iOS's UI toolkits. Or using signals from a Mono application.
While MS may have certainly intended to fragment Java, the core concept of platform specific APIs isn't inherently a bad thing.
Also note that during this time, MS supported Windows on non-Intel architectures so I'm not sure about the x86 comment.
I'm all for it and see Java as doing quite a bit of good (despite the terribleness of the language and brain-damage it's inflicted on developers, which is a great bit of bad). I just don't get how it helped Sun, and I suppose, history shows it did not.
The more important question is, was there anything that prevented Sun or anyone else from implementing those in the other OSes? Otherwise it looks like programs are limited to the most basic level everywhere. I do remember the MS JVM was significantly faster than Sun's. So the solution was to slow it down or for Sun to make it's own faster?
It's in Microsoft's interest to make things run faster on it's own OS. For example of a similar issue, see Flash on OS X and Jobs' memo regarding how it sucked and made OS X look bad and refusal to allow it in iOS. How is that a good thing and what MS did bad?
Instead of improving the JVM, Sun decided to make money by suing MS. No wonder that bloated piece of slow crap that looks like crap is dying a slow death and stopped being relevant.
I remember using a popular bittorrent client called Azureus that ran on the JVM. My laptop would get super hot and slow to a crawl. Also remember how J2ME made mobile Java development a complete hell before Windows Mobile and iPhone came on the scene?
http://www.zdnet.com/three-billion-devices-run-java-yeah-but...
This is not true, actually. JDK1.1 1997 had JIT. MS had basically exposed the Variant and COM, the windows handles and part of WinAPI. Overriding paint(Graphic) on a native AWT component (say java.awt.Button) did nothing either and so on.
>>Instead of improving the JVM, Sun decided to make money by suing MS. No wonder that bloated piece of slow crap that looks like crap is dying a slow death and stopped being relevant.
JDK1.3 with hotspot compiler (May, 2000) had the fastest JIT by far.
> It was the fastest Windows-based implementation of a Java virtual machine for the first two years after its release.[1] Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, sued Microsoft in October 1997 for incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard.[2]
Which is the fastest JVM after 1997 is essentially a moot point after the lawsuit was filed.
I also like how Apple completely sidestepped such kinds of situations in iOS by disallowing third party SDKs and alternate browser engines. If there can be no Netscape or Java, there is no threat and no need to kill something and potentially get into trouble. Same with Google and Chromebooks.
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flas...
The clause was removed just 5 months later; there were rumors that potential antitrust issues were involved:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/05/apples-compiler-policy-...
History repeats itself.
> The more important question is, was there anything that prevented Sun or anyone else from implementing those in the other OSes?
Yes, they made calls to native microsoft frameworks etc.
> I do remember the MS JVM was significantly faster than Sun's.
Lets dig out the binaries and do a perf test.
> So the solution was to slow it down or for Sun to make it's own faster?
This comment makes no sense. No idea what you mean by it.
> It's in Microsoft's interest to make things run faster on it's own OS.
This isn't about performance
> How is that a good thing and what MS did bad?
Who said it is any different?
> Instead of improving the JVM, Sun decided to make money by suing MS.
Yea they just abandoned the JVM in 2005. Hasn't changed since.
> I remember using a popular bittorrent client called Azureus that ran on the JVM.
Java for front end had requirements that most desktops of the time failed to meet. So what?
> Yes, they made calls to native microsoft frameworks etc.
Uhm, yes, that's how you run things on another platform. You have to call that platform's APIs. Sun's JVM won't be able to create an AWT window without calling WinAPI's CreateWindow. They have to call the native APIs at some point or another.
The simple facts of the case are that Sun license the Java brand to someone who wants to implement a JVM/API but you have to pass the TCK/JCK testsuite to keep the license. MS would have failed that.
So in the 90's Sun Microsystems created Java, which has two components, the programming language and the runtime. The runtime (the Java you install) lets you run things written in Java on any device regardless of OS or CPU architecture. Write once, run anywhere. This was a huge threat to Microsoft. Why write Windows programs when you could write Java programs and they'd run on any computer?
So Microsoft wrote their own Java runtime called the MS JVM, and made it part of Windows, it extended Java to do Windows-only things, meaning there were now "Java" apps that could only run on Windows, destroying the whole point of Java.
This became part of the antitrust trial because it ruined Sun's product. In a separate case, Sun sued Microsoft and won.