Here I am killing some moments before heading to the airport back home and I run my eyes over Erik's latest headlines of the hot blogs that I should possibly read.  I find myself drawn to the post titled 'Commodities, Railroads and How Sun Monetizes Java' and blindly click on it and start reading what is a very interesting article.  Only when I get to the end to I realise its written my Jonathan Schwartz on his own blog!  I didn't even notice his picture at the top, DOH!  The power of blogs eh?  It is only when he said "Our belief..." which got me scrolling up to the top to see who authored this.

Anyway, since he isn't brave enough to leave comments or even enable trackbacks I guess we are left to comment privately on our thoughts to this article.  Personnally I felt it was good.  I love his definition of what a commodity is and how in the computing world that we really don't have that yet.  The closet thing we have in the IT world he asserts, is bandwidth.  Although the article soon runs out of pace in trying to strengthen the case for Java. 

The bandwidth metaphor works but whether Java/webservices is the 'railroad' I am not convinced.  There is too much disparity and versions inside the Java world to be considered a commodity.  Its not quite there yet.  Will it ever get there?  I doubt it.  Technology changes pace too quickly and even with the introduction of JDK1.5, sorry JDK5, there are things in there that means backward compatability is increasingly becoming difficult.  But thats the nature of the beast, we want to see inovation, we want to see new cool things.  We are developers thats what we live for.

At any rate, hats off to Mr Schwartz for using his website (I won't call it a blog yet, because he's not really entering the spirit of the blogging world to call himself a blogger) to further push Sun's propoganda.