See here where Fake Steve Jobs compares Java to Lotus Notes . Flippant. But yet…Java is two different things: a platform and a language. Both are going to survive for a good long time in BigCo. They too deeply en-snarled in BigCo’s internals to be excised in a single stroke.And like Notes, Java’s corporate parent isn’t doing so well. No surprise, Java simultaneously commoditizes hardware and operating systems, leaving professional services as the only way to make money from it.Hopefully, SUNW—oops, I meant JAVA—will continue to do better with Java the language and/or platform than IBM has done with Notes p.s. Yes, you (I mean you!) have written great stuff with Java. Why not? You are a programmer, it is a programming language, you can write anything you want with it. And there were people who did good things with Notes in its day. I respect you for it, even honour you for it. But don’t take it personally when I try to look at the big picture and ask where the platform is going and whether it looks like anything we’ve seen before.p.p.s. I’ve heard from a number of people asking why I am implying that Sun and IBM aren’t doing so well, when they are thriving in a certain sense. I posted the share price for a reason: a privately held company exists for whatever reason its shareholders deem appropriate, such as employing people or building great products. A publicly held company, OTOH, has one and only one overriding mandate: returns for its investors, either through dividends or through share appreciation.Over the last five years, Sun has done better than IBM. At the moment, 100% better. So if I were a JAVA shareholder, I would want to be very sure that Sun has a business plan to do something differently. And when picking a platform, I want to be sure that its parent isn’t going to wake up one day and ask, “So why are we doing this, exactly?”