Symbian deal 'unlikely' for Sun

Sun CEO, Scott McNealy has revealed that his company is unlikely to join the Symbian alliance.

McNealy met with the chief executives of Nokia and Ericsson - two members of the smartphone venture, also backed by Motorola and Psion - on consecutive evenings at this week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

But he told Silicon.com: "We'd rather support them [Symbian] like crazy and not alienate their competitors. We want to be an arms supplier to all sides."

Meanwhile, in a keynote speech at a Sun conference in Rome, McNealy concentrated on what he has preached for some time: that computing will soon be based on a utilities model where people use remotely managed resources as they need them.

To support his claims about a move to a "post-PC era", the Sun boss said recent figures show that for every chip sold to run a PC, 30 are sold which ship in non-PC appliances.

He then turned to America Online (AOL), a company which, pending approval of its acquisition of Netscape, will work with Sun on a dedicated Internet access device. McNealy said 40 per cent of AOL users use their PCs purely as devices to access the service, but promised them that in the future that "for every time you use your PC, there'll be 30 other ways to access AOL".

As usual, Microsoft and Bill Gates came in for special attention. McNealy questioned Microsoft's huge market capitalisation in a world where software is becomingly increasingly free, and said the move to free email, Linux and other freeware was the reason behind the software giant investing in content providers.