[JAVAONE] JavaOne Keynote

As you know I am attending the JavaOne conference. I jotted down my key takeaways during the keynote for myself, which I thought I’d share here. The keynote featured several Sun execs, particularly Jonathan Schwarts, their President and COO.

• Take Away 1: Java as a platform is incredibly ubiquitous. This argument rests on the premise that the world is a lot more than personal computers, and very importantly includes mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs. In trying to put this in to numbers, they seem to try to take credit in counting the number of network elements of all kinds of things which I don’t think of as Java (RF-ID tags are not really Java are they? Is eBay Java? I don’t think of ring tones as Java.)

• Take Away 2: There’s a renewed focus on the desktop. With this new focus, I think Sun is admitting that in the past Java was not known as suitable for desktop apps. And of course this point contradicts the preceding one to some extent. Java Studio Creator is their VB killer. But the demo was confusing because it looked more like a drag and drop web based development tool. The business that this is for non-programmers is not especially believable, but this is not different from MSFT

• Take Away 3: Sun talks a lot about monetizing Java , about the size of the opportunity for developers. Sun claims that the Java economy is $100B. Not sure how they get to that number My questions is how will Sun itself make money here? I asked some people, and the answer I got was “Sell hardware, sell Java cards.” Somehow I am not persuaded. Why are they doing so poorly?