Hello,

A few weeks ago I asked a question about JAVA and received several replies that basically dismissed it for a number of reasons. While I certainly understand a little bias on this forum, it is hard to ignore JAVA's massive growing popularity.

Some of you may have seen this article at http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/main/0,10228,2581701,00.html. Among other things it reprots claims that JAVA will soon surpass VB as the most popular and fastest growing language and that "the Java coalition will have beaten out Microsoft as the supplier of primary technologies for e-business"

For me - I don't care so much about the politics or loyalties - I am concerned with making good decisions about the tools I use to create my vertical applications, which are soon to be net-heavy with B2B features. My biggest concern about MS is the total lack of any cross-platform support in any of their development tools. Simply put - what is the MS solution for developing an application to run on a Macintosh? IE and ASP? "don't use a mac?" Come-on! I need to offer the same UI rich application on both platforms - and perhaps LINUX too before long.

In short - JAVA, even with it's problems, at LEAST gives me an option NOW. What can MS offer? What is the MS answer for Macintosh and LINUX? What is the MS answer for application service provision?

Ken