A couple of weeks ago an anonymous Twitter account told the story of an almost-forgotten Microsoft April Fool’s prank, the 1996 seeding of empty boxes of a “Microsoft Coffee” Java development tool across Seattle. Of course, at the time, the pranksters didn’t know that Microsoft was already working on its own Java implementation, Visual J++.
That was the start of the first part of Microsoft’s Java story, which ended up the subject of litigation between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems over its support for nonstandard Windows APIs, before being removed from the Visual Studio suite of tools. That might have been the end of the story, if not for Azure and Microsoft’s commitment to “go where the developers are.”
