From: arne@vajhoej.dk

On 10/15/2025 7:58 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article ,
> John Dallman  wrote:
>> In article <10ckadi$7dr$1@reader2.panix.com>,
>> cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:
>>> I never quite got the business play behind Java from Sun's
>>> perspective. It seemed to explode in popularity overnight, but
>>> they never quite figured out how to monetize it; I remember
>>> hearing from some Sun folks that they wanted to set standards
>>> and be at the center of the ecosystem, but were content to let
>>> other players actually build the production infrastructure.
>>
>> The trick with monetising something like that is to price it so that
>> customers find it far cheaper to pay than to write their own. However,
>> you still need to be able to make money on it. I've seen this done with a
>> sliding royalty scale.
>>
>> However, this kind of scheme definitely would have clashed with the
>> desire Sun had to make Java a standard piece of client software. It may
>> have been doomed to unprofitability by the enthusiasm of its creators.
>
> I think that's a really insightful way to put it.
>
> My sense was that they overplayed their hand, and did so
> prematurely relative to the actual value they were holding onto.
>
> I mentioned Microsoft and Java on the client side: I believe
> that they were largely responsible for failure of Java desktop
> applications (and the supporting ecosystem) to take root.  As I
> recall, at the time, MSFT tried to license Java from Sun: Sun
> said no, and I'm quite sure that McNealy was positively giddy
> about it as well.  However, I think in doing so, Sun gravely
> underestimated Gates-era MSFT, because then Microsoft very
> publicly said, "we're going to wait and see whether the industry
> adopts Java on the desktop."  But, since Microsoft was the
> biggest player in that space, the rest of the industy waited to
> see what Microsoft would do and whether they would support it on
> Windows: the result was that Java no one adopted it, and so it
> never saw widespread client-side adoption.

Not quite what happened.

Sun did license Java to MS.

But MS violated license condition and their J++ had a couple
of incompatibilities (they replaced JNI with something better
and they replaced RMI with COM that fitted better with Windows).

Sun sued and MS had to pay 20 M$ (peanuts for MS) and ditch the product.

So MS ditched their Java and Sun delivered Java to Windows
users that wanted it. And in the early 00's that was most Windows
users, because everybody needed applet support in their browsers.

Until applets died out and Java stopped being needed/wanted
by most ordinary users.

And the world changed and in recent years MS created their
own Java again based on OpenJDK.

>                                         Oh sure, it had some
> adoption in mobile phone type applications, but util Android
> (which tried to skirt the licensing issues with Dalvik) that
> was pretty limited.

Almost all the 3 millions apps available for the 3 billion
Android phones are written in Java or Kotlin. Not particular limited.

>                        Anyway, while Microsoft stalled, they did
> C# in the background, and when it was ready, they no longer had
> any real need for Java on the client side.

MS started .NET and C# after they were forced to drop their
Java.

Anders Hejlsberg was actually headhunted from Borland to
do MS Java. And when that was no longer a thing he moved
on to creating .NET and C#.

> The framing that the web rendered Java on desktops obsolete is
> incomplete.  Certainly, that was true for _many_ applications,
> as the web rendered much of the client-side ecosystem obsolete,
> but consider things in Microsoft's portfolio like Word, Except,
> PowerPoint, and so on. Those remained solidly desktop focused
> until 360;

What moved to web in the early 00's were all the internal
business app frontends. The stuff that used to be done on
VB6, Delphi, Jyacc etc..

Mostly trivial stuff but millions of applications requiring
millions of developers.

MS Office and other MSVC++ MFC apps may have been difficult to
port to web at the time, but it would also have been difficult
to come up with a business case for it - that first showed up
when MS had a cloud and could charge customer per user per month
for it.

>       one never saw credible competitors to that in Java,
> which was something Sun very much wanted (recall McNealy's
> writing at this time about a "new" style of development based
> around open source and Java).

OpenOffice owned by Sun at the time actually did implement
some stuff in Java.

But neither as OpenOffice as office package nor Java as language
for desktop apps ever took off.

>                             Similarly, investment in C# shows
> that they weren't quite ready to move everything to the web;

????

One of the main areas for C# is web applications ASP.NET and
was so from day 1.

(not everybody may like ASP.NET web forms, but that is
another discussion)

Arne

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