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How Microsoft is broadening Java's scope

The "embrace and extend" directive from Redmond has received heaps of criticism -- but a positive spin on the plan is offered here

By William Blundon, JavaWorld.com, 02/01/97

According to Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategy master and author of The Art of War, "The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting, he captures their cities without laying siege to them, he overthrows their kingdom without any lengthy operations in the field." What he calls the "strategy of the sheathed sword," Microsoft calls "embrace and extend," a strategy that uses Java to maintain Microsoft's dominance in the software industry. Despite the uproar over Microsoft's strategy in the industry, it's bound to prove appealing to many developers.

Microsoft arrived at this Java-focused point rapidly. After a late start, Microsoft has made the Internet its own and is maneuvering at lightning speed to control this new world as adroitly as it did the old. Microsoft has made the unthinkable commonplace: It has given some products away for free, has licensed others to independent standards organizations, and has adopted standards and technologies developed by others. No objective observer viewing Microsoft's Internet announcements over the last twelve months can call them anything less than brilliant.

Embrace and extend

The problem with Microsoft's strategy? It wasn't established by Mother Theresa, and altruism does not reign in Redmond, WA. Like all companies (including Netscape and JavaSoft), Microsoft is struggling for competitive advantage, and its plans for embracing and extending the technology developed by others must be viewed in this light.

Many reports on Microsoft make its initiatives sound like a euphemism for the medieval torture on the rack -- whereby the victim's hands and feet are securely embraced, the body continuously extended until death or religious conversion ensues. Actually, what Microsoft is doing is not very different from what Netscape is doing. Some view the Java strategies of Microsoft and Netscape as a life and death struggle, but compromise is possible. In fact, it is under way.

Microsoft is extending Java on several fronts, each exhibiting careful thought and posing its own level of threat and opportunity. Perhaps the most important is the adaptation of the Java virtual machine (JVM) into the Microsoft virtual machine (MSVM). The MSVM is an ActiveX/COM interpreter that executes Java code by wrapping it and exposing all interfaces through standard ActiveX APIs. This means (much to the chagrin of Microsoft's detractors, perhaps) that ActiveX controls and Java applets can share resources and can follow the same rules -- such as the standard OLE and COM interfaces. With much of the existing software in the world (particularly within corporations) conforming to the OLE and COM specifications, the scope of Java could be broadened dramatically.

MSVM is positioned as a clean superset of the standard VM; that is, it is extended. Standard Java code will execute in the MSVM, yet when necessary or desirable, developers have access to additional, albeit non-portable, features. (Microsoft has announced a plug-in that lets users access MSVM through Netscape Navigator -- proving, among other things, that the company has a sense of humor.) These enhancements are important to many corporations trying to leverage their existing investments in both software and the skills of their development staffs while beginning to move to cross-platform standards.

 

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