Life with the press

I get interviewed by the press fairly often. Every now and then, one of them gets a few things wrong. ComputerWire just put out one titled "Threat to 10 million Java Goal from Microsoft, Says Gosling" that doesn't correctly get across what I meant. The title of the article is somewhat sensationalist. He got the quote from me correct: "The biggest problem is going to be competition from Redmond," but that was just a general statement that for everyone in the computer business, in essentially every area, Microsoft is the big competitive question.

The big error, though, is in this part:

While welcoming Java's pervasiveness, Gosling appears cool to a branding campaign. "There's a part of me that likes being taken for granted. One of the goals I had as an engineer was for the technology I build to be completely transparent. If I pull out a cell phone and have to boot-up the JVM [Java Virtual Machine], that would be bad,"

I am not at all cool to the branding campaign, I think it's a great thing to be doing. What I was talking about when I made the taken-out-of-context quotes is that as an engineer, a major goal of any technology I work on is for it to be as easy to use as possible. I try to ensure that nothing gets in the way of the end user accomplishing their task. The technology should be transparent. From my engineering point of view, a perfect piece of technology is one that does its job without the user being aware of it. No fuss. No muss. Just accomplish the task at hand.

This has nothing to do with brand awareness.

June 17, 2005