Waiting for Gosling...

Okay, they found a funny engineer. How likely was that?

The announcement of HP's agreement to put Java on all their Windows boxes is both cool and nearly predictable. Disk space is free, after all. Someone was going to decide that the "value add" of putting Java in the box was worth the small incremental cost.

(By the way, didn't Jonathan Schwartz say Dell make it so all their boxes "can" come with the latest Java? And isn't that different from saying it "will" come with the latest Java? Will customers have to ask for the feature, or will they bundle it in like [it sounds like] HP is doing? And if so, how many people will think to ask?)

By "predictable" I don't mean "unimportant". Microsoft is obviously trying to stifle an alternate platform so they will continue to control the common platform. They tried "embrace and extend" with Java, and lo and behold, they got called on that. So next they're trying to take their platform and go home. It still is open whether they will be allowed to do that, but so far it looks like it.

So HP is giving an extra value to their boxes, but this also gives them an opportunity to loosen their dependency on the convicted monopolists in Redmond. If others follow suit, all of us, including HP, will be able to target Java instead of Windows for most of our work.

Of course, that's an "if" there. Something needs to make that value of the HP box matter. That's up to us.