By Sarah Left, 17 November 1998 00:25
NEWS The results of our exclusive Silicon.com Microsoft poll are in, and Silicon viewers have come down strongly on the side of the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and pure Java.
With responses from 436 senior IT professionals across Europe, the poll found overwhelming support for the DoJ's intervention in the free market and the majority of respondents felt the software giant should be split into two companies: one for operating systems and one for applications.
Silicon viewers are more interventionist than their US counterparts, illustrated in a similar poll conduct by CIO magazine in the US - two-thirds of their respondents felt the DoJ should stop attacking Microsoft.
More than three quarters of Silicon's poll felt Microsoft is aiming to kill off Java.
Martyn Lambert, Sun's director of marketing and technologies, said: "There seems to be mounting support for Java in the industry, so I'm not surprised at the results. From our point of view, we prefer to focus on our strategy: the open, barrier-free interface. We are absolutely pushing the ubiquity of Java, from smartcards through to PDA (personal digital assistant) and Symbian-type initiatives to virtual machine implementations."
Here are the results of the poll:
Question: Should the Department of Justice leave it up to market forces to regulate Microsoft?
Yes: 30.4%
No: 69.6%
Question: Do you think Microsoft is out to kill off Java?
Yes: 76.1%
No: 23.9%
Should Microsoft be split into an operating systems company and an applications company?
Yes: 60.4%
No: 39.6%
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below