The letter was written out of fear that they would not [install the JVM on their own]. It's curious to me. As I was talking to my friends in the software industry, people who have been around a long time and know a lot of people, I realized that none of us knew anyone at the computer manufacturers. We've never had to talk to them before. There's never been anything to coordinate between the Internet people and the computer people. I don't know what they're thinking. Maybe they're all sitting around their boardrooms making plans to provide Java, but the letter was in part an attempt to reach across this divide and say: "We've got a lot of software you can use and you've got a lot of hardware we can use. There's a really simple way to make things happen right now."

So you see Microsoft's choice to abandon Java as an opportunity rather than a defeat. But what if that opportunity is never realized? What is the significance of Microsoft's decision?

Given that Microsoft's commitment to Java evaporated when it was told it couldn't embrace and extend it, the negative in the current announcement is a marketing negative, not a software announcement. If it furthers the perception, as Microsoft is eager to do, that there's no point in writing Java code to run on the PC, then it's a negative. But in terms of the loss of Microsoft's version of JVM, that's essentially an evolutionary niche that's just opened up.

How do you think this new development will affect the Java resurgence that you noted in the article you wrote last month about LimeWire and other Java programs?

This is the thing that originally put it in my mind. I was analyzing Gnutella clients for another project that had nothing to do with Java. I downloaded several of these and liked LimeWire the best. Then and only then did I realize it was written in Java. And I said, "My God, I thought Java was dead on the PC." I've never seen anyone write anything to run either fast enough or have a good enough interface.

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That's when I realized that a lot of the work that's been done on [Java] hasn't shown up on the PC. In addition, of course, PC hardware is now made of gigahertz chips and 60-gigabyte drives for $1,000. So it's just one of those things that when it launched in 1995 was too slow, took up too much space and so on. But now the hardware has gotten inexorably better, to the point where it now makes sense to write software for the PC in Java.

So is this a turning point for Java? Will Java die if the OEMs don't adopt it?

I don't think the OEMs not picking it up kills Java. I think what that says is, this is a language for everything but the PC. And I think it's too bad to treat the PC as a special class of device. Java right now runs on PDAs and cellphones and servers. It would be great if it could run on PCs as well because what we're seeing is an increasing integration of the fabric of the Internet at the level of architecture. Web services and peer-to-peer are ideas about architecture that say, "We're treating all devices as peers." It would be great to have a language that reflected that.

Where does Microsoft's .Net campaign fit into all of this? Is Microsoft simply trying to push Java to the fringe, so that .Net will be adopted more quickly?

I would put the causal arrow in the other direction. Microsoft's .Net is in part a result of the thinking it did when Java came along and actually rattled its cage. If you look at the work it's doing on C# [pronounced C sharp] and the CLI and CLR -- the common language infrastructure and common language runtime -- it's plainly Microsoft's answer to Java. And in many cases, it's a good answer; it might even be a better answer. But it's not a competitive answer if you can't also use Java, because the thing Java has is millions of programmers, hundreds of millions of lines of code, thousands of debugged programs. And what Microsoft is trying to do -- if you look at the languages that the CLI handles, despite its anti-open-source stuff -- it's going to support Perl, it's going to support C++. Conspicuously absent from that list is Java. Instead, what it's trying to do is write something that ports Java source code to C# source code. What Microsoft wants people to stop doing is writing code in Java, and much of what's going on around C# and CLI and CLR is an attempt to make that happen.

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