From
Slashdot - Engadget has an
interview on future mobile usage with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz. A good interview overall, but this below is I think the main part of the economic money shot. Interview questions in italics below:
Is there any driving force or impetus for you guys to become a part of one of the Linux or open source mobile phone standards groups like LIPS, or OHA, or one of those?
You know, consortiums don't produce phones. Companies produce phones and companies produce products so we'll certainly -- look, the Java community by definition is a open source community. It's the world's largest open source community if you think about it in the sense that every day we distribute 15 million GPL software artifacts into the marketplace, called Java runtime environments. Every month we ship about fifty million GPL software artifacts. We are certainly going to work with the consortia that have volume and mass to make sure that we can identify standards.
Probably the most important for developers though isn't what are the driver APIs you use, it's going to be what are the developer APIs you use. What are the things that a developer who wants to deliver a service on a phone want to think about. The construction of the phone itself there is a much smaller group of companies. Most of which are frankly hardware companies and what we want to go do is to focus on the developer platform which gives them the broadest access to the broadest market.
So it sounds like from where you guys stand, obviously you are very enterprise focused--
Well, we're very developer focused.
But from the sound of things, it's really more that you guys believe in the democratization of mobile platforms whereas what we are seeing in the market -- especially in the consumer market -- is people becoming less concerned about access to cheaper open mobile platforms and even more concerned about a better end-to-end user experience. Do you think that these two interests can coexist?
First of all we are very focused on the democratization of network access. Now second and apart from that, I think that if you want to captivate a consumer audience you have to build an engaging user experience. A simple example for the consumers we really care about who are for example, MySQL users is the product must be freely available, downloadable, installable and up and running within fifteen minutes. Why? Because if it takes seven hours of configuration you are not going to get any users.
The same applies to a mobile platform which is: you'd would like to be able to get it turned on and get it up and running. And that's why companies like Blackberry, Nokia and Apple have done better than their counterparts who may not have been as easy to interact with. I think that the price of that product and the user experience of the product and the innovation of that product are not necessarily related in any way. But I can tell you that the intersection of all of those will produce the most popular products in the world.
By definition free is a more accessible price than six hundred dollars. A beautiful six hundred dollar phone will almost by definition ship in lower volume than a slightly uglier but functional text phone for no dollars. I think if you look at the proliferation of gadgets in the world, the proliferation of devices, the world is filled with way way more simple phones than they are WiFi enabled devices that allow you to look at maps.
We've argued before that Planet Mobile needs the equivalent of an "MS-DOS" to transform a Tower of Babel market market of many variants into an economically useful large, single market....a similar thought by a
commentator on slashdot:
Where's the open source mobile platform that will run on top of third-party hardware?
I think about this every time I look at the OpenMoko and Qtopia stuff. I don't think that producing hardware designs is a bad thing per se, but I don't understand why there hasn't been more effort at rolling out distro for mobiles hobbyists could install on existing phones they might have lying around.
I understand there are Linux-based phones. But think about where FOSS computing might be if Linux and BSD had to wait for custom-designed hardware, or for a manufacturer to build a PC around that product. There'd have been nowhere near the growth.
There needs to be mobile FOSS for more-or-less commodity hardware if there's really going to be a part for it to play in the growth in the mobile market.
