Tuesday June 15, 2004

For the story behind the story behind the story, it all starts here in general, but in particular in the comments.

There is *always* a story behind every story. Some more involved than others. I heard the 50K foot story (from a horses mouth) of why Sun pulled Java standardization from ECMA way back when. That story is definitely involved, but at the time I think it was a good decision for the Java community. I don't know the details of the story and I am not sure I would repeat them if I did (I leave that decision to the horse).

How many of you have heard the story of how Java came to be in the first place? For all for the complaining about Java AWT, how many of you know it was written in 6 weeks by two people (or so I have been told) to get Java "out the door"? How many of you know the first target for Java was devices, not the desktop/browser? Use this as a starting point.

I fell into a trap. A trap of my own doing. Well, not really a trap since we are all rarely privvy to the story behind the story. Jon Udell, in his response to my blog points out the story behind the story. This is a trap everyone will fall into. We always have opinions about things we don't know everything about. This includes, by the way, analysts, journalists and bloggers :) If it weren't so common, we wouldn't have so many cliches as "Don't judge a book by its cover", "A behind the scenes look" and "the story behind the story."

Next time you see something that piques your interest and you start building an opinion, just remember these cliches.