Sun goes on the offensive with Java

Scott McNealy CEO of Sun Microsystems has spoken out to defend the business merits of his company's Java effort, saying that, despite disappointing sales of Sun's own Java software, the effort has helped keep Microsoft at bay.

During a speech at Sun's JavaOne conference in San Francisco, McNealy acknowledged that Sun lags behind others in selling Java products such as application servers that run Java programs on servers. But he said Sun's Java language has helped the company financially by preventing Microsoft technologies from taking over.

"If everybody was doing C#, .Net and Windows, there wouldn't be a very large total available market for any Sun products," McNealy said.

Sun is trying to seize the initiative with a multimillion-dollar Java branding campaign that's designed to convince average people that they want Java devices, McNealy said in a news conference after his speech.

"We went from defensive to offensive," McNealy said. "It's now time to go on the offensive and say the Java brand means something."

Java, a programming language and its supporting software, lets a program run on a variety of different computers without having to be modified for each one. That universality poses a threat to Microsoft, which has been tangling with Sun over Java since not long after Sun licensed the software in 1996. Though Java hasn't displaced Windows as a foundation for running desktop computers, it is often found in two domains where Microsoft isn't as strong: servers and, increasingly, mobile phones.

Sun has signed up Intel as a partner to optimise Java for Intel's XScale processor for mobile devices, and it joined a host of mobile phone makers in a plan to ease programming for Java on mobile phones.

Much of the activity at the show centred on mobile phones, for which Sun has dozens of partners selling phones and phone services that use Java. Many mobile phone systems use Java-based smart cards to establish the identity of the phone user. Sun argues that the cards make companies that own music, games or video comfortable selling that content and will help grow the market - for both the content and related Java phones and services.

And at least some in the industry agree, including Michael Nash, senior vice president of internet strategy and business development for Warner Music Group, who spoke at a panel discussion Friday after McNealy's speech.

"We believe that in the next three to four years, the US wireless music market could be between $500m and $1bn," Nash said, adding that about half of that would come from downloading customized ring tones for phones. "Globally, by 2008, it could very possibly be a $5bn to $10bn wireless music market. In five-and-a-half years, the wireless space could constitute somewhere between 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the global music market."

Warner's Nash sees mobile technology as a way to repair the music industry's bad record in electronic music distribution.

"Having your butt kicked up around your ears in the online world gets your attention. We've been humbled," Nash said. "We will participate in the ecosystem, learn from the experts, try to figure out how to make our content available."

Guy Laurence, CEO for global content at Vodafone, said games are even bigger: $75bn will be spent on downloading games for mobile phones in the next 10 years in Europe, he said.

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com