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I had intended to comment on this myself, but Patrick Logan has already gotten there. What's fascinating to me is the lengths Sun has gone to in order to not make changes to the JVM. As Ted said in his post, MS has done better; they've made the same sorts of changes at the VM level. We do this at Cincom as well; we don't like to change the byte code for VisualWorks or ObjectStudio, but we do when it's warranted. The last such change was in 5i, when we introduced Namespaces. A quick look at Ted's post explains why Sun has run down the road to hell - they've exposed some interesting "holes" in the JVM. Smalltalk is much simpler this way - a few simple rules you can learn in a few minutes.

It's not just Sun's business model that is confused; their technology guys make bad choices as well.