At first glance, the recent ruling in Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft doesn't appear to have much significance. True, when Judge J. Frederick Motz granted an injunction ordering Microsoft to distribute Sun's Java platform with Windows, Sun scored a legal victory.
But when you look at the marketplace impact of the court's legal remedy, it doesn't appear to shift continents.
Sure, Microsoft will need to distribute Sun's Java Virtual Machine. But with a cool US$40.5 billion in cash and an operating system used on 90 percent of PCs, the software giant has no reason to worry.
Sun, for its part, will still be primarily a server vendor, meaning that in this IT climate, it still faces an uphill crawl.
And Java, even without this ruling, will continue to generate more interest than .NET. It doesn't take a court action for people to realize that Java is a superior product.
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