In the heart of Silicon Valley last Tuesday, a lone district court judge did something the entire antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department can still only dream about: he forced Bill Gates to change one of his key business practices.
Java, the universal programming language owned by Sun Microsystems, has long been Microsoft's biggest bugaboo. Gates said in a private e-mail that its potential to make Microsoft obsolete "scares the hell out of me." If Java should capture the hearts and minds of programmers, computers could one day run without the need for an expensive operating system like Windows. To...