Java's Morbidly Obese Client
That's one big update. Doesn't bother broadband people like me, but it's a real obstacle to achieving ubiquity with the latest features. Flash Player is the world champ here, achieving 80% adoption in around 12 months and 95% adoption in about 18 months for each new version.
Many PCs end up eternally stuck on the Java version that shipped with the machine. That means that Java developers who deploy apps have to rely on the lowest common denominator - the Java runtime technology that was state of the art in 2003. It's not a great recipe for app dev innovation. They effectively have to put their features in oak barrels in a "runtime cellar" for proper aging before the features can be consumed by developers. Because if clients can run your app without doing a it doesn't matter how cool it is.
Having worked on .NET clients, the most widely deployed version is definitely a concern for product teams. But other than development tools, no one thinks to do Java on the client anyway. The interfaces it creates are too foreign and the runtime overhead is too high for snappy UI.
Java is all about the server so why should Sun care how big that download is. Sadly, after having revisited the J2EE stack recently (after doing client software for the last few years), I was horrified at how bloated they've managed to make everything on the server now too. The emergence of Web 2.0 simplicity for online services has now taken a big portion of the Internet server market away now too. Java is now pigeon-holed to the enterprise where we can only expect it to continue to get more bloated and more complicated.
[BTW, that software update image is behind a password protected URL, so no one except you can see it :-)]
Sorry about the image issue. Now fixed.
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