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Java pet store hit ‘planned by MS’ – memo

Dog eats Dog

A drive-by shooting at a pet store last week was planned by Microsoft, reckons Java expert Richard Öberg.

Police say rival gangs based in Redmond, Wa. and Mountain View, Ca. have a history of trouble, often favoring pet stores to exact their retribution.

But Öberg, who issued a withering critique of The Middleware Company's benchmark last week, has now obtained an internal Microsoft memo on the subject. And he reckons The Beast's clawprints are all over this hit.

"As we have seen, Microsoft's involvement in this matter goes far beyond just providing a test lab and reimbursing travel expenses," he writes, here.

"They are the initiator of this whole project (as described in the TMC FAQ), have cheated to the point where their code does not even comply with the basic rules of the test, and have obtained the results of this report far ahead of its official publication. Since I believe most of my readers are quite intelligent, I will let you draw your own conclusions about what all of this means," he adds.

In the memo, Microsoft's Gregory Leake describes a marketing flurry to coincide with the publication of the benchmarks.

I'm not convinced that this is unusual. TMC didn't receive money directly from The Beast, and has vowed to rerun the tests. A campaign isn't sinister - but simply good marketing by Microsoft.

On the other hand, we wouldn't know about the "hospitality" without Richard's counter-offensive, which encouraged TMC to explain the tests. It will revisit them, it says.

What Öberg does establish is that Microsoft wrote its .NET Pet Store for speed, while Sun wrote its Pet Store to show programming techniques. We really do need a neutral party to establish some transparent benchmarks for this kind of exercise. And blow me, there already is (almost).

If .NET is going to succeed, it's going to have to win on something more than performance. And if J2EE is going to prosper, it's going to have compete on something other than scalability. Case closed.

Next? What's that? Well, just cut the baby in half. ®

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