I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.
It's not about HTML 5 vs Flash. They're mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the web.
Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities.
Whatever device you use, Windows will be there. Windows will be everywhere on every device without compromise.
Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways.
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.
The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.
I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
With something like Dropbox, it was immediately like, 'Wow, this is literally something that anyone with an Internet connection could use.' Everyone needs something like this; they just don't realize it yet.
It's a world where you're going to have a phone, a tablet, a computer - you don't have to choose. And so what's more important is how you seamlessly move between them all... It's not like this is a laptop person and that's a tablet person. It doesn't have to be that way.
With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time.
This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.
I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.
The overall experience Skype provided was superior to other folks because of the underlying architecture and the ability to provide a superior experience.
Everyone has friends that are limited to one platform and ecosystem, whereas what we've built with 'Fortnite' is a friends system that works across seven platforms. You can have friends across Xbox and PlayStation and PC.
I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.
When I talk about that Apple ecosystem, the ability to get one application to run across those five platforms is very difficult. In the future of Microsoft, using HTML5, IE9 and 10, the scalable OS, the ability to do that gets much, much easier.
We fully recognized that our customers have a variety of devices. They're carrying all sorts of things. And we want to bring our world-class apps to those devices.
If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.
Flash and HTML have co-existed, and they're going to continue to co-exist.
One of the things that Java is good at is giving you this homogeneous view of a reality that's usually very heterogeneous.
Adobe and Apple have collaborated a lot over the decades. There's a lot more for us to do as well.
Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach.
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don't design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don't really care, as long as we're selling the one the customer wants.
The cornerstone of our Tech 5 development platform is this uniquely textured map or world, where every surface doesn't have a repeating texture on it. It can all be stamped and modified due to the work done on it. The core technical question to be resolved on this was how do we get that media set to be playable on the iPhone.
