The blog & portfolio of Matthew J. Rogers

Do you want fries with that software update?

November 3, 2007

Java update

I fired up Windows XP (via Parallels on my iMac) this evening and was greeted by the popup balloon you see above.

“Update Java Now… and get OpenOffice FREE!”

Does the “special offer — act now!” vibe seem weird to anyone else in this context? It’s a fracking software update. Not only that, but Java and OpenOffice are in rather two separate realms of the software world — Java is a programming language/runtime environment, and OpenOffice is an open source office suite (like Microsoft Office, but free). It’s a fine piece of software, but I just find it damned odd that it’s being “marketed” by Sun through Java software updates. It’s like…um…ok, I just sat here for more than 5 minutes trying to come up with a good analogy, but for once I can’t think of anything that asinine.

2 comments ›
Posted in Tech & Science

Similar posts

2 comments

  • John Downey November 4th, 2007 at 11:08 am

    It’s not as unusual as you’d think. Since OpenOffice is written primarily in Java and is a Sun supported project (a spin off of their StarOffice initiative).

  • Jason November 9th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

    I too thought this was very, um, strange. As if there isn’t already have enough crap software jamming up the whole Windows scene…

    I was greeted by the same message on my only windows machine in my almost all Mac prepress office and was a bit taken back as well!

Leave a comment