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> Bill Gates would have foreseen the iPhone as a really big threat from day one and we would now be marveling at one of his famous internal angry emails that changed Microsoft's direction

Just like he foresaw the Internet as a big threat, right?

[aryastark]

As far as web applications dominating and taking over market share from the Windows ecosystem? Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine

> Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, sued Microsoft in October 1997 for incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard.[2] It was also named in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust civil actions, as an implementation of Microsoft's Embrace, extend and extinguish strategy

You can bet all the money in the world that Gates would have been acutely aware of the App Store. The App Store is, after all, Apple doing to the handheld market what Microsoft did to IBM and the PC. Which is, establishing themselves as a gate-keeper for all things mobile.

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Web applications from the last decade don't have anything to do with Java. Nothing. The web as it exists now is something Microsoft never understood; not even now.

[aryastark]

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Why do you think Netscape created something called Javascript (emphasis on Java)?

The answer is obvious if you lived in the late '90s. Java was a real threat to the desktop.

That doesn't mean MS was wrong. They were. But Bill Gates didn't have his head up his ass, either.

[4ad]

Javascript doesn't have anything to do with Java.