I've long wondered what's in it for Oracle and now Microsoft. Microsoft stands t...

pjmlp · on Feb 4, 2015

> Oracle seems to have no real upside to maintaining Java

Since the early 2000 the majority of Oracle GUI tools across their products are written in Java.

Long before acquiring Sun, Oracle did acquire Bea.

Oracle still sells Bea Weblogic JEE container and the J/Rockit JVM, which also has a real time version.

They have their own JSF framework and IDE.

So becoming Java steward is not so strange.

tsotha · on Feb 4, 2015

I always believed Sun shot itself in the head with Java. They had this idea getting people invested in a cross platform ecosystem meant new software could be run on Sun hardware.

But what really happened is people who had been locked into Sun with legacy software wrote applications in Java and then switched from Sun to cheaper hardware running Linux or Windows.

SixSigma · on Feb 5, 2015

They did have Microsoft removing their helmet and doing the reloading.

Sun called it: Mankind vs Microsoft [1]

It drained their energy and stole their focus.

It was the apex of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/03/why_sun_threw/

Interesting from that 2004 piece

> Microsoft's biggest global competitors are exactly as they were on Thursday: Nokia and Sony.

How different things looked then!

cpeterso · on Feb 5, 2015

Similarly, IBM tried to make OS/2 a "better Windows than Windows" by supporting both OS/2 and Windows applications. This just encouraged application developers to write Windows applications because they would run on OS/2 and Windows.

xxxyy · on Feb 4, 2015

Java is the corporate powerhouse, especially for banking. Together with Oracle DB. Owning two out of three crucial components (the third being the hardware) creates a lot of good business opportunities for them, makes it easier to enforce monopoly.

Gurkenmaster · on Feb 6, 2015

Oracle already released new SPARC processors that are optimized for the Oracle DB and Java: https://blogs.oracle.com/rajadurai/entry/sparc_m7_chip_32_co...

gaius · on Feb 5, 2015

Oracle seems to have no real upside to maintaining Java.

No, but they have an awful lot of downside from not maintaining it.

Consider the history of IBM, their grand strategy in the early 90s was that Smalltalk would be the enterprise language of the next few decades. The Java juggernaut rode roughshod over IBM. Or Microsoft, they would have loved to have kept Visual Basic and Visual C++ cash cows going forever, Java completely blindsided them. Altho' it may be technically less powerful than Smalltalk or C++, in terms of mindshare (or hype if you prefer) Java is too powerful for Oracle to risk falling into anyone else's hands.

parkovski · on Feb 4, 2015

Both companies have a lot of enterprise software that exposes either Java or .NET APIs, and lots of companies pay them for support and troubleshooting, and licensing those other products.

Padding · on Feb 5, 2015

> No one is paying for C# and Java directly

No one you know.

Suppose some large and wealthy entity has trouble running some money-making legacy application that happens to be running atop the JVM. Who do you think will they call to fix their issues asap?

.. Which is why there's a lot of interest in having the people working on the JVM on your payroll ..