Jonathan Schwartz was interviewed by Steve Gillmor of eWEEK. Steve grilled Jonathan on the competition with Microsoft's Longhorn. They discuss the fight for the desktop and for the mobile phone. Jonathan talks about how Java mobile devices are out selling the Microsoft smart phones by 15000 to 1. He also thinks that Sun can make a dent in the desktop world.

View the interview with Jonathan Schwartz

try this link... to the beginning of the interview:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1388597,00.asp


the article is a hoot... schwartz really sets his reality distortion fields on overload!

Vignette'd links get broken by TSS; try this:

http://tinyurl.com/vuyz

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Clustered JCache for Grid Computing!

<Tim Dwelle>the article is a hoot... schwartz really sets his reality distortion fields on overload!</Tim Dwelle>

You are right this is good comedy!

I love the comment about out selling Microsoft by 150000 to 1, this is no surprise many of the major mobile phone vendors now have even their most basic models Java enabled whether you like it or not. A realistic measure would be of the sales figures between Java devices with comparable features to the smart phone offerings, I am sure Java is still probably ahead but the numbers I am sure are a bit more modest.

There are a lot companies which make money off windows.

- Intuit
- Adobe
 
and a whole bunch more.

I do not know any friend personally who works for a company making money
in selling software for mobile devices - wireless telcos control that market
- not developers or ISVs.

Free software is not a good business model for for-profit-businesses.

Support contract revenue may not be enough.

Nokia (Nokia==Symbian==Java) fears that Microsoft will do to the cell phone industry what they did to the PC industry. By licensing Windows to all comers and creating design guidelines (in conjunction with Intel) for PCs, Microsoft harnessed the competitive forces of thousands of OEMs around the world to drive down hardware prices to the obvious benefit of PC consumers. This turned PCs into a commodity product with the razor-thin profit margins such a market entails.

The big Wireless telcompanies are scared witless of Microsoft and will do everything to try to keep MS out. But Motorola has seen the obvious(that the fight is going to be between Windows & Linux) and have sold their shares in Symbian. Also Psion, the inventor and main shareholder in Symbian has seen the light and the new Netbook Pro from Psion runs CE .NET instead of Symbian OS. (that enraged the Symbian fans so much that they have started a sign petition to withdraw Windows CE .NET from Netbook Pro of Psion!;) http://msmobiles.com/news.php/1416.html.

Gartner about Symbian,
"They really don't have a clear, strong enterprise story, and that makes it difficult for them" http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,2125561,00.htm

Motorola’s new phone MPx200 is no4 most selling phone on Amazon, the 3 other before cost $0 with package. The SPV 200 did go right to the top in Mobile.se review here in Sweden beating Ericsson P800 and all Nokia’s.

The money earned by development for .NET compact Framework and Smartphone already beats Java with at least 15000 to 1. "AT&T Wireless Launches Developer Portal" http://www.smartphonethoughts.com

Regards
Rolf Tollerud

<quote>
Motorola’s new phone MPx200 is no4 most selling phone on Amazon, the 3 other
before cost $0 with package. The SPV 200 did go right to the top in Mobile.se review here in Sweden beating Ericsson P800 and all Nokia’s.

The money earned by development for .NET compact Framework and Smartphone already beats Java with at least 15000 to 1. "AT&T Wireless Launches Developer Portal" http://www.smartphonethoughts.com
</quote>

I am from Europe and everyone that i know has a phone. Guess what is the percentage of motorola phones ??? Nearly non-existent. What's more... nobody even heard of SmartPhone or .NET compact Framework. But they do have lots of java apps on their phone. So I have absolutely no idea, how anyone can earn a dollar using .NET compact Framework and Smartphone.

>
> Regards
> Rolf Tollerud

Hey Rolf!! It's nice to get you back in the forums again.. not.

Do you have any idea about the sheer volume of siemens, nokia and ericsson phones here in europe (of course you do, being an european and such) Do you have any idea how many J2ME based games are downloaded by phone owners every second??! Even in finland there are already lots of small companies making money by creating J2ME games for mobile phones.

> Nokia (Nokia==Symbian==Java) fears that Microsoft will do to the cell phone industry what they did to the PC industry.

No Rolf. It's Microsoft who does the 'fearing' this time. There's some true competition this time. So far all attempts by MS to enter the mobile market have been totally pathetic. You simply cannot ignore the facts.

P.S.
Tell me how many smartphones have been sold (globally) and I'll tell you the figures for J2ME enabled phones.

Aaaah, Rolf. You must be spending your day furiously trying to find reasons why .NET is winning so you can feel good about your pop idol, Microsoft. Nothing is better than healthy competition, right? :) Let's see how Microsoft will do with this one. At least they can not monopolize this market.

Rofl,

Windows on a cell phone is actually pretty nice. I'm thinking of getting one. They cost a bit more, and they're complicated, but they definitely have some nice features and they're finally getting small enough to be a phone. And Windows phones run Java well too ;-)

But 99% of the market thinks differently. For mobile phone makes, every penny of margin counts. A Symbian license is much cheaper. A Java license costs less than US$.60 per unit. Windows CE in its various incarnations is simply too expensive, and Microsoft is still losing money on it in the phone sector, and so are the companies that make Windows phones. With rare exception, it's just not good business.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Clustered JCache for Grid Computing!

Reality

1) Java phones have more market share
2) Windows phones have very little market share
3) Telcos controls the software deployment tightly
4) Consumers have very little say in what s/w is installed on the phone

More reality

1) J2ME - no isv is selling any software and making any money
2) Ringtones - I wonder how long it will be a money maker
3) There will be a merket of $0 for mobile software for ISVs
as long as phone companies deploy the software

There is no viable ISV market for mobile devices right now.

Stop attacking rolf - focus on the issue.

>
> Regards
> Rolf Tollerud

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=new&aid=2630

-- begin article rip --
Good news for Nokia's game deck as download game sales rocket

Sales of downloadable mobile games to N-Gage users have outstripped sales to Nokia 3510i users by 8 per cent despite a huge disparity in the installed base for the devices, according to UK mobile game retailer mProvision.

The company, which operates mobile gaming portals ngagegames.co.uk and mynokiagames.co.uk, says that although N-Gage users account for only 4.5 per cent of its subscribers (as against 17 per cent for the 3510i), sales of games for the device have broken all records.

This is both good news and bad news for Nokia. It proves that the device, despite a critical battering over many technical or design flaws, is being used enthusiastically as a games console; however, it suggests that users are choosing to purchase downloaded games (which cost around £5.75 apiece) rather than full-price N-Gage releases on MMC cards.

This will come as no surprise to mobile game developers, many of whom have privately expressed the opinion that the N-Gage will prove popular as a platform for standard downloaded Java games, rather than for full-price retail games.

"We manage opt-in subscriber databases for all phone game enabled handsets in the UK," explained mProvision managing director Fox Tucker, "and while our n-Gage users account for just 4.5% of our total subscriber base, we've seen game sales for n-Gage games via our sites break all records. Our opt-in n-Gage subscribers have clearly demonstrated that they bought the handset predominantly as a handheld games console."
-- end article rip --

These are not 'smartphonethoughts' these are gamesindustry facts.

"No company has ever monetized Microsoft's infrastructure in the history of Microsoft."

yep.. absolutely no money to be made at all building on the Windows or Office infrastructure.

I find it interesting he keeps saying he wants to close the sale with the IT ministry in India, or China, where they don't want to pay for the desktop. What is so appealing about closing the sale with a customer who does not or cannot pay you money? Is he assuming that in the near term these countries are going to change to start paying money for technology, so that Sun should get in on the ground floor? This point seems like a setup for failure, not increased revenues.

I find it interesting he keeps saying he wants to close the sale with the IT ministry in India, or China, where they don't want to pay for the desktop.
<
It does not mean they do not pay anything. He was also talking about volume of things, and with India and China, there certainly is volume. With volume there might be opportunity, then developers... We'll see.

I agree with the other post regarding volume and opportunity. Interestingly enough, I was about 2 hours car ride south of McNealy in Shanghai when he was there to kick off a JCOE in China. It was my first trip in China, presenting at a technology conference at a top university in Hangzhou, and I have to tell you, its
different than what I imagined. Everyone had cell phones, and there are a lot of people there :-), and the capitalization and spending habits are changing in the country with foreign investments, etc. China is still a net importer of software, but their software trade market is something $13 Billion USD in 2002, and expected to grow 30-35% a year. That's a big market to get even mindshare penetration from the consumer-->business-->government.

Jin

M$FT is fighting an uphill battle in China. Its hardball tactics on enforcing software licensing alienated a lot of people. It is not getting new customers among government agancies because MS Office is too expensive for most people, and on top of that the Chinese IT Ministry publicly endorses and invests in Linux. The only paying customers are foreign companies doing business there.

So SUNW is pretty smart by taking advantage of this situation and pushing its Linux-based Java Desktop System over there. Capturing mindshare when a market is in its infancy is a good long-term strategy to generate business. SUNW probably knows it is too late to compete with M$FT on the desktop in North America and Western Europe, but by going into China at this juncture is a good move.

I think this is part of the reason why Steve Ballmer is in China as we speak...

I found Schwartz's remark about JXTA noteworthy:

"JXTA has been incorporated into the Java standard and will be incorporated into the Java Desktop this spring. It's a natural evolution of that simple collaboration environment, where peer-to-peer could be used to transport new versions of documents."