February 20th, 2009
Hype and open source
Jonathan Schwartz made an online appearance last week, placed his foot into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.
Based on downloads he claimed that Sun’s JavaFX is “the fastest growing RIA platform on the market.” (The Big Apple Circus is now playing at Stone Mountain Park outside Atlanta. Through March 7. I will explain.)
Whoa there, sport, responded Dan Rayburn at his Streamingmedia blog.
Sun is new to the RIA market yet apparently, has already declared themselves the winner, even though no JavaFX based video apps are being used in any wide scale adoption. Not a single one.
Jonathan’s going all Roland Burris on us, he implied.
No. But he is selling something.
One of Dan’s readers quickly parsed Jonathan’s words for him. He was talking about the Java platform. It depends on what the meaning of is is.
That’s not how I read it. I see the Sun CEO conflating downloads of JavaFX with use of the platform. They are not the same thing. Not everyone who downloads Chrome makes it their first-choice browser. The same is true, in spades, with Rich Internet Application tools.
This relates to my earlier story on Facebook and Internet values. The behaviors we expect from vendors after we adopt their products are different from those we expect in the proprietary world.
So are those we expect before we adopt. The carnival barker has a tough time when we can see through the tent to the reality inside.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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