NEWS 05.02.99 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, which is 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. (Full story.)
05.02.04 Five years back, Symbian was already establishing itself as a bulwark against the likely progress of Microsoft in mobile. Naturally, many commentators thought, a rival such as Sun Microsystems would want part of the action.
As it turns out, Symbian kept its focus on companies specialising in mobile handsets. Others would join - and even eventually leave, in the case of Motorola - but they all had names familiar from the world of cellular communications.
At silicon.com's latest get-together with McNealy, last summer, he re-emphasised a desire not to play in the mobile-handset space, though clearly the company does pretty well if you consider the number of phones that run Java applications now.
Even Java pureplay mobile OS company SavaJe didn't get a Sun investment, though this publication has learnt that there were talks on the subject.
Sun and McNealy know that being on the side of a particular initiative doesn't mean having to own equity stakes in partners. Not that Microsoft has been beaten as a competitor in mobile, mind.
