Programming

Alright, not that I wrote or implied that anywhere... In fact Java was probably the whole reason Oracle bought Sun to gain leverage over Android. Which fits very much into what I wrote - one company innovates, another one buys them to squeeze users (Google wasn't a customer of Sun, they used their own implementation which wasn't exactly Java but also not exactly anything else). Just that Sun by all means wasn't a small company, I mean they controlled almost a full stack with their own processors (SPARC), workstations and servers (Blade was somewhat famous), an operating system with Solaris (and if you want to count it even JavaOS) and Java on top of those, and they contributed a lot of technology like NFS, ZFS (license discussions aside). On the other hand, when they bought someone, the product wasn't just milked to death, but actually integrated into their stack and continued to be developed in the open.

Shame it turned out that way, I guess Sun was a bit overleveraged with how much they did vs. how much they made from it. And to think that Oracle paid less than a fifth than what Twitter sold for later for all of that technology to go to waste, just for a chance to sue Google... But we long as suits continue to license their stuff because they have cool advertisements at airports, this will keep going.