Two sets of experts are telling me what technologies my company should be using to protect itself from future change. I am not an expert, and it is difficult for me to follow the battle between Microsoft's .Net and Sun's Java. Microsoft tells me that it is much easier to implement .Net and that Java is really expensive. Can you help?
Name and address supplied
North Point
This is not an easy question to answer because it may depend on issues totally unrelated to technology.
Java burst onto the scene late in 1995, after Sun had spent many years working on this programming language. As Java began picking up steam in 1996, two things happened. Companies like IBM, Oracle and others jumped on board because they saw Java as a great solution. Microsoft, on the other hand, saw Java as a threat and soon created a similar language, C#.
Since that time, Java has grown steadily and Microsoft has had a bit of a problem attacking it. Now that Microsoft has settled on (for the time being, at least) .Net, it thinks it has a strategy to bring back developers it had lost.
