Jon's Radio: It's not the J in Java Virtual Machine that matters, it's the VM
During the June 18 Gillmor Gang show, I asked Hummer Winblad's Mitchell Kertzman about open source business models. Kertzman said 1 that the key factor, from his perspective, is the way in which the open source stack frees commercial software companies from the burden of "dragging around an expensive platform." He also questioned the need 2 for the JVM, citing two reasons. First, that Java's portability has become a non-issue now that there are only two platforms that matter: .NET and Linux. Second, that the rise of XML Web services has given a boost to the text-savvy scripting languages: Perl/Python/PHP, the "P" in LAMP.
[Jon's Radio]
This post by Jon Udell is interesting in two ways. One interesting thing is the subject of the post. If the VM is the platform will Microsoft become irrelevant? I think they will but haven't been able to latch on to why I think that. I think that with Longhorn Microsoft is doing the equivalent of making a better buggy whip just as automobiles are coming of age.
The other thing interesting is the "MP3 clipping service" that Jon has built. Worked perfectly for me on a Windows platform (yes, I do see the irony there). The service allows him to link to a specific clip within an MP3 stream. When I clicked on the "said" link above I got to hear the exact section of the MP3. Block quoting for MP3. Very cool.
