Re:Standards (Score 1)

Sorry, but Sun offends me only just slightly less than Microsoft. One only has to witness how they are attempting to insert Java throughout all sorts of media and network standards (thereby ensuring all implementations pay the "Java tax") to see that Java's "openness" is highly overrated. McNealy'd like nothing better than to turn Sun into another MS (bad behavior and all), and certainly hasn't skimped in applying monetary and political pressure to get his chance. Anyone who believes Sun (or Oracle for that matter) gives a rat's ass about the "public" in their fight against MS is delusional.

The idea of designing and planning the IL code around efficient JIT operation, and giving it less language-dependency is a great modification of Java's approach. It shows that Microsoft has put quite a bit of thought into how to swat Sun aside, by addressing the problems people want fixed, as opposed to endless oft-incomplete "augmentation".

The runtime libraries are also very well done. They seem to have a far cleaner notion of heterogeneous usability than AWT/Swing/etc., and provide lots of useful stuff without much bloat. Again Microsoft is showing some real talent in how they've optimized the design and selected what made it into the runtimes. Compared to Sun's extremely politicized and far-from-open Java evolutionary mgmt., MS has again (and as usual) demonstrated their superior ability to "iterate towards optimum." Perhaps if Sun had actually been open about Java's development, this situation could have been avoided.

Overall, MS has shown a much greater "clarity of implementation" in .NET than Sun ever did in Java (instead preferring to use Java as the kitchen sink). Sun deserves to get spanked for how they muddled and confused their intents with Java. We won't get into Sun's primary apparent use of Java as a "licensing money tree" which they come back to far too often.