Farhad Manjoo has a story at Salon on the ongoing battle between Java and .NET. One thing he doesn’t seem to address is that despite the battle for supremacy, this isn’t a winner take all fight. There are no doubt billions of lines of Java code floating around, and as time passes the best features of .NET are going to be sucked into the Java world. By the same token, with Microsoft’s muscle behind it, .NET and the CLR are going to be successful. The software development ecosystem is going to support both of these options long into the future. I’m also encouraged by the fact that a court is going to force Microsoft to include the JRE with Windows. Now Sun ought to be putting a ton of time into making a much friendlier and more elegant JRE for Windows. Obviously right now most of the Java action is on the server side, but there’s an opening on the desktop here for Sun to exploit. Hopefully they won’t blow it.