Larry, Bill and Scott too...

Larry, Bill and Scott woke up this morning with a spring in their step and a job to do.

Over breakfast (taken separately, according to our sources) the three mulled over the same question - how to win the hearts and minds of arguably the most important constituency in the IT industry, the developer.

Operating systems and hardware may pay the bills but only if there are applications to run on them. The developer, as application creator, is kingmaker. And that's why Oracle, Microsoft and Sun spend a disproportionate amount of time lobbying this particular group.

So after breakfast, Larry and Scott joined forces to announce details of a migration tool that moves business applications from a Microsoft Windows environment to Java. Meanwhile, Bill chose the Tech Ed 2001 developer conference to outline the importance of Visual Studio .Net, a key component in the company's strategy to convert Java software code to C# (pronounced 'C sharp').

With the battle lines drawn - Microsoft versus Oracle and Sun, Bill versus Larry and Scott, Windows versus Java - the obvious question is who will win? The rather disappointing answer is this latest move is unlikely to make a great deal of difference.

Development environments are complex beasts and developers will need to be presented a very compelling argument to make a permanent switch. Fail to make that argument and more than likely a developer will choose the path of least resistance.

So what's the compelling argument behind a move to Java?

Supporters have always built their case on three virtues - it's open, it's a single development environment that runs across multiple operating systems and it's not Microsoft. Half a dozen years after it was first introduced, Java seems to have left the masses unconvinced.

Getting to grips with C# may prove a steep learning curve for existing Windows programmers but it's nothing compared to learning Java from scratch. And if you have got to grips with Java, why would you move to Windows?

Our three heroes should have stayed in bed.