"Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, sued Microsoft in October 1997 for incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard.[2] It was also named in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust civil actions, as an implementation of Microsoft's Embrace, extend and extinguish strategy. In 2001, Microsoft settled the lawsuit with Sun and discontinued its Java implementation"
Glad to see they're acting more mature these days.
They still intend to port Hadoop to Windows. There is little to prevent extending it.
What concerns me more is:
> the company is providing “connectors” for moving data between the two.
Microsoft loves to sink a lot of time into gee-whiz crap that lets their MVCs throw together gee-whiz crap using GUI tools without ever writing any code. They love it so much that they often waste all their effort on that stuff without bothering to get the fundamentals in order, and the end result is unusable garbage like much of ADO.NET and early versions of Entity Framework. That one sentence makes me fear more of the same old garbage: We'll get a port of Hadoop that comes with a plethora of toys in the System.DraggyDroppy namespace for impressing the suits, but is crippled by a broken set of bridge libraries for the programmers.
Which is fine. A Windows port of Hadoop isn't really necessary. We can just keep using REST or whatever to keep the Windows servers talking to the servers that do actual work, and Microsoft can keep chasing its own tail while it slides into irrelevance, and everyone can be happy.
Sadly, for programmers who work where the impressionable suits reign, it's usually the suits who pick the tools their underlings will have to use to assemble whatever was conceived in the demos. They'll end up having to deploy Hadoop on Windows 8 Server and talk to it using the vile offspring of Clippy and Hadoop that lives under System.DraggyDroppy.
I for one love Microsoft. There, I said it.
(Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.)
It's OK. It's not your fault.
They also prove it's possible to write portable code in Java. ;-)