Combining your comment with Schmidt's I wonder if we'll end up with a society where everyone has a common name. If everyone is named John Smith, it would be hard to track you back to the correct facebook page or whatever.

Choice? Oh man. Steve Jobs isn't going to like this.

Those are definitely good points, but just to add.

1) I agree with the generics comment and wonder what value they really have outside of having typed collections. I struggle to find a decent use of them and often see them used where the implementation limits future maintenance. I know in C++ templateing was a huge? feature, which generics seem similar to. I don't do any of C++ work so maybe I'm just missing the point but I struggle to see much value in it. At least in the work that I do.

2) While it's true that there are a lot of options, most of the key ones are pretty much standard now a days. Things like Log4J, Spring, and Hibernate are staples.

In fact if your project uses Spring you can pretty much swap out key technologies with little effort if they end up being deficient or get obsoleted in the future. If the project you had to maintain with the Struts cowboy didn't use it, well I guess you're pretty much fucked there.

I'm sure people have written competing MS technologies for similar reasons as that Struts hating guy. In our industry you can't pan a whole technology stack because some retards fuck up an implementation.

I don't really know much about .NET, but I can comment on the Java side.

While Java the platform has been slow to adopt features, it does have quite a thriving open source community that gives it a lot of additional functionality (for free as in beer I might add).

In fact some projects have sprouted up because of failed Java initiatives. Things like Hibernate came about because Java messed up Entity Beans so badly there wasn't a good way to do database access for example.

Java still has a lot of deficiencies on the front end, however. Things like JSP/JSF Struts/SpringMVC made it better than it was 10 years ago, but they still are a pain in the ass to use. I'm starting to get involved in Adobe's Flex development talking to a Java backend so I'm excited to see if that can mitigate some of Java's front end problems.

Thanks for the response. I gives me a lot to think about. I really want to leave AT&T probably for Verizon so I think I'll just put up with my crappy phone for now. Hopefully either the iPhone will come to Verizon or the Android platform will improve soon.

I wish these things came with a lease with an option to buy.

I think your post is interesting, and I'm sort of in a similar situation.

I bought an iPhone on launch day and used it until pretty recently. I would still be using it today, but the pins on the iPhone connector got corroded somehow and it was nearly impossible to charge or sync. I took it to the Apple store and they said my options were paying like 200 bucks to fix it or renewing my contract with AT&T and paying 99 bucks for an iPhone 3G. In retrospect I should have taken one of these options.

I decided instead to go with a crappy Pantech teenage girl phone because I didn't want to pay the repair costs or data plan anymore. Aside from texting, which it's good at, this Pantech is just terrible and I'm regretting not getting another smart phone.

I like some of the Android stuff on paper and was hoping to get one this fall, but your concerns are giving me pause.

It seems like most of your concerns revolve around sub-par software and ditched it for the more polished iPhone 4. Was that your only problems with it? Don't you think over time as Android matures those sorts of issues will go away?

Hunh. I never would have guessed that cat food sandwiches were so good.