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by: Bernard Teo








Creative Commons License

Copyright © 2003-2012
Bernard Teo
Some Rights Reserved.

Wed 21 Apr 2004

The Ultimate Toolbox for Business

Category : Commentary/SunTechDay2.txt

I'm sitting in front of Leon Chen's custom-made "Ultimate Toolbox for Developers" poster stand at Sun Tech Day. We (i.e., my friend Hai Hwee and me) had been asked to help set up the Xserve at the booth to show the widest variety of applications - e.g., a J2EE insurance application we've been porting over to run on the Tomcat server, and a series of demos we've done to show Java on OS X, from the command line to Cocoa to web-based applications - that will, in fact, do justice to that claim. I hope we did manage to achieve that.

Mostly I hear the same thing - "I never thought the Mac could do that". For example, the Oracle guys, below, came over to watch trailers on the QuickTime site but ended up amazed when they found Oracle running on the Xserve. And on my iBook. They quickly got round a few more of their friends to see something they never thought they would see - Oracle actually running on a Mac. (And they showed us where to find a newer 10g release).

I've never had much affinity for Apple's sales and marketing people. I ended up over the last two days with even more antipathy. Not that I had expected much. But I can't help feeling, from contrasting the focus and determination to add value that Sun brought to Singapore (over their last ten years of working with the government, ministries, and major corporations) that all these technologies that Apple's own developers had wrought was like so much casting pearls to the swine, as far as the Apple sales people were concerned. Sun, I'm sure, would have done so much more - if their people had all these richness, instead. If only we could merge Apple and Sun. But, then, the world ain't big enough for both Steve Jobs and Scott McNeally together, I should imagine.

If Apple could get their sales people's noses away from concerns about shop fronts, and all the frills, signifying nothing, and thinking about how cool everybody think they are ... if they could just do that, the Mac would have been a contender. Now, if only I didn't like the Mac quite so much...

[But I'm in good company; it is easy enough for all the Java guys to see that James Gosling likes his PowerBook a lot. Where their hero goes...]

Posted at 4:20PM UTC | permalink

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