On Aug 16, 10:18 pm, Casper Bang <casper.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > 1) Did Sun have anything directly competing with Android? Nope, JME > was a sorry excuse for an application layer, which couldn't do > anything remotely interesting with the actual phone hardware.
Think back to the initial announcement of JavaFX ... The architecture Sun intended was for JavaFX to be a mobile stack (well "all the screens of your life") with a Linux core, no user-space Linux stuff, a JavaME stack with a selection of JSR's, and JavaFX as the cool GUI engine. Never mind that Sun/Oracle never managed to implement that idea, that's what the vision was. Android implemented the vision Sun had for JavaFX. It surely helped quite a bit that several JavaME/JavaSE/JavaFX team members are now working for Google on Android. > 2) Do you know what Google gets out of Android? Nothing... there is no > licence fees involved whatsoever so "greedy" is hardly applicable. > > Google created a marked that was not there before. It may be that it > got in the way of some Sun CTO's wishful thinking about JME and/or > JavaFX but that's more a testament of Sun's inability to innovate and > execute. I for one am happy that thanks to Google, I can now write > interesting software for my phone, browse the web with full flash > support and sit here in the train early morning using my laptop > tethered giving me wifi. Yes it's too bad about Sun, but that's hardly > Google's fault. > > /Casper The market which was there before is mobile devices which support adding applications to them. Java ME at one time was that market. Both iPhone and Android took that market by dint of a more compelling total system. I agree with you that Sun failed to create a compelling JavaME stack. In fact if the JavaME on my Sony Ericsson phone is any indication, it was downright ugly, slow and embarrassing. (FWIW I used to work down the hall from the JavaME people - this has nothing to do with how smart the people on that team are/was) I believe that if JavaME had been compelling, that Apple/Google might have had a different opinion about strategic direction. To suggest however that Android created its own market fully on its own merit is not correct. The market appetite was already whetted by the devices which went before it. Further because they used the Java language and many of the Java classes it gave them a bit of a running start in terms of developer knowledge and familiarity. There's a viewpoint where Android is actually a negative - that it acts to fracture the Java ecosystem and the value of the Compatibility promise pushed by Sun as the vision for the Java ecosystem. + David Herron http://davidherron.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
