After a short layoff, Microsoft is growing the polluted Java again. Boxed in by Sun's lawsuit the company decided not to ship its JVM (old, and pending resolution of the dispute, getting older) with Windows XP, but now it's going to ship it with XP SP1, which will be with us in a few months. It will also, bizarrely, be discontinuing downloads of the thing.

Why the change? We know not, but we do know that it is not entirely correct (or indeed, even correct at all) to say that Microsoft has resumed shipping Java. Because, as Sun has been saying with the aid of batteries of lawyers, it is not Java as such. And it's a bit old as well, given the totalled state of Microsoft's Java licence with Sun.

By strange coincidence, Sun has been offering downloads of the real thing (we are right here, because like it or not, and many of you don't, Sun reserves the right to say what the real thing is) here, and more importantly, mobile phone companies have virtually univerally espoused Java as the Next Big Thing. So maybe they're wrong, but they're desperate - and you're not going to have a product to offer them in their desperation, you say?

Unfortunately, Microsoft's JVM is not that product. This is not so much thinking on the hoof as thinking with it. Go download the Sun one. ®