Remember ActiveX? It's gone.

There is this phenomenon in the computer business of companies -- and sometimes whole groups of companies working together -- announcing new products and technical initiatives that just never appear. Or sometimes they appear and then go away. Or sometimes they appear to go away, but just change their names. Microsoft loves to do this and what it amounts to is announcing technologies for tactical, rather than strategic, reasons. These programs are blockers and tacklers in the game of personal computing. They'll never make a touchdown, never score a point, maybe never yield a profit. But if they take out an opponent, that's enough.

Here's the story of ActiveX, which began in the days of Windows 2.0 as something they called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). DDE was whipped-up by the boys and girls in Microsoft's Excel group specifically to link spreadsheet data into Microsoft Word documents. It was just a clever idea to make the linked document change if the spreadsheet it was connected to changed. More than anything else, they just wanted to show it could be done.

Then some kids in North Carolina at a company called DaVinci Systems extended DDE across a network. DaVinci founder Matt Ocko, who was a teenager at the time, had spent a few months working at Microsoft and took some interesting ideas back home with him. Microsoft didn't think to do this, but when they saw NetDDE they knew that it was good.

When the world discovered object-oriented programming and Apple, IBM and others began supporting a technology called OpenDOC for creating compound applications over networks, Microsoft declared that NetDDE was now to be called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), the next great advance, because it used the "O" word. OLE's job was to link applications and data across systems and across networks, but its most important job was to kill OpenDoc, because Microsoft didn't control the OpenDoc standard so that standard had to die. And die it did, when an overstressed Apple pulled out of the OpenDoc consortium early this year and laid-off it's OpenDoc programmers, who were promptly hired en masse by Microsoft to make OLE as good as OpenDoc had been.

Except by that time it wasn't OLE anymore, but ActiveX. ActiveX's job was supposed to be to extend OLE across the Internet by linking data and program objects over the Net. ActiveX could even be the basis for applets or whole applications. Sounds like Java, right? That's because with OLE having killed OpenDoc, ActiveX's real job was now to kill Java. But Java would not be killed, at least not easily. And ActiveX had some problems. ActiveX Controls were some of the most powerful bits of code around, but so poorly designed from a security standpoint that even Microsoft couldn't defend them.

So ActiveX and the entire Active Platform technology, which Microsoft spent millions to promote, is officially dead. Evidence of this can be seen through the disappearence of the section on Microsoft's homepage that once held all ActiveX related content. Most important, though, is what effect this sudden change of direction will have on the Windows developer community. Active Platform was supposed to be the future of Microsoft and its developers, and the fact that they are abandoning this initiative is significant news for anyone interested in Internet development or who thinks that Apple is the only company that changes its strategic or technical direction.

Microsoft's official line is that something called "Windows DNA" technology will be their "new framework for building distributed computing solutions that integrate the Web with client/server models of application development," replacing all aspects of ActiveX technology.

What the hell does that mean?

But wait, there's more! "The heart of Windows DNA," say the spin merchants from Redmond, "is the integration of Web and client/server application development models through the Component Object Model (COM). Windows DNA services are exposed in a unified way through COM for applications to use."

In other words, this Component Object Model is what we used to call ActiveX.

Conventional cyberwisdom was saying that ActiveX was dangerous and poorly-designed, so the easy fix was to just change the name.

But there is no intention to change the true purpose of NetDDE/OLE/ActiveX/COM, which at this point is still to destroy Java. And it is a very smart strategy. Hiding behind the disguise of the very open, very politically-correct Dynamic HTML, DNA still requires programmers to write to proprietary Microsoft APIs. In the simplest terms, Microsoft has found what it thinks is a way to keep its money-making products right in the center of personal computing, blunting the impact of the hated Java.

And what about Java? Why is it so hated by Microsoft? Well Microsoft hates Java for four reasons: 1) because Java is cheap and bound to be popular for its price, alone; 2) because Java is not bound to Intel processors more than to any other type of processors, threatening Pentium-centric Microsoft; 3) because Java is controlled by Sun and not Microsoft, and; 4) because Java's true purpose is to hurt Windows.

Talk to anyone in the software business who doesn't work for Microsoft and Java sounds like the second coming. It's a platform for network computing, a method of distributing cross-platform applications, it's this, it's that. For all the salivating and speaking in tongues that's going on the truth is that Java is a programming language and that's all. And as a programming language it has strengths and weaknesses. It's strengths are in strict rules for memory management: Java code just plain runs where the C++ code it is generally replacing requires lots of debugging to run right. But the cost of civility is performance. Java is a dog. Java is so slow, in fact, that an entire industry has grown-up around products that turn Java code into faster, non-Java code. This means Java, rather than being a programming language, has turned into a development tool.

Still, Java is sacred. It's supposed to run equally well on any processor or operating system. It doesn't really do this, of course, but since most of us aren't programmers and most programmers aren't Java programmers, we can ignore the fact that porting a Windows NT Java program to the Macintosh can take weeks, not seconds, as it is supposed to.

Java is sacred for only one reason -- because it is not owned by Microsoft. And Sun, which turned Java from an operating system for TV remote controls into a social movement, is determined that Microsoft will never own Java, either. Not that Microsoft isn't trying, with it's J++ product and various politcal moves in standards bodies to wrest control of Java from Sun and place it into at least less-hostile hands. Microsoft has been screaming, in fact, that Sun in its ownership of Java is behaving like, well, like Microsoft!

So the dirty little secret is that Microsoft is inventing products purely to hurt Java because Sun invented Java purely to hurt Microsoft. And where in all this are we, the end-users, the people who ultimately pay for these battles? We're just looking for a faster way to download our dirty pictures from the Net.