I do agree that adoption is, perhaps, not the clearest choice of words. Deliberately so, no doubt. As I said, his job is to sell in such a way that Sun’s voice is at least heard above the noise. Perhaps “deployment” would have been a better word. It’s a rather fine distinction though; and he might not have got so many people talking if he hadn’t been a little dramatic in his wording.

Surely, though, if you’re going to judge Jonathan Schwartz so harshly on the precise semantics of his wording, then you’d want to hold yourself to the same standards?

“Meaningless spin” must be over-stating things somewhat, given that there is actually significant information content in his message. That is, the message contains a measure of how widely and how rapidly the run-time is being distributed (and yes, the measure is imperfect and likely rather optimistic).

Well, any intelligent person knows that there is a constant flow of JRE downloads. These now include JavaFX; and as far as I can tell most of these downloads were driven neither by the need to run a JavaFX application, nor by any conscious desire or decision to install the JavaFX runtime. Therefore the figure says nothing about JavaFX adoption, and is not the “extraordinary news” which Schwartz claims. This level of hyperbole deserves to be called meaningless spin. Maybe that is the CEO doing his job, but I find it disappointing.

Tim

Rather obviously, however, it’s not meaningless spin. There surely can’t be many intelligent people that didn’t understand that the “100M” statistic is about the number of people that might be able to run JavaFX without any installation required.

BTW, of course, Jonathan Schwartz was selling the number by providing some noteworthy quotes for people to pick up on. That’s his job. From what I can see, it seems to be mission accomplished: lots of people now know that downloads of the JavaFX run-time have surpassed a hundred million.

“…demonstrating the fastest adoption of any product Sun has ever shipped.”

adoption? I suspect the number of people “adopting” it is much, much smaller. it’s not adoption when it’s a required add-on to an existing download/update. Which was of course the entire point of this blog post.