Jonathan Schwartz: Oracle bungled its chance at mobile Java | Hacker News Reader

Jonathan Schwartz: Oracle bungled its chance at mobile Java

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43 pointsiProject12 comments

Great interview, lots of good stuff in there. Another interesting point (regarding Amazon's cloud strategy):

You have IBM and HP and a whole bunch of other companies saying, "Ooh, wow, let's hang out with Morgan Stanley and sell them a computing cloud." Wrong answer. Now you have nine months of a procurement process, three months with the security department, four months with the IT group that's in charge of making the decision -- and Amazon just got another 200,000 customers.

Some good bits but if the chance was so good with mobile Java why didn't he take it while he was still running Sun?

With Dalvik deliberately just different enough to be outside of Sun's control what real options were there except give up or sue? I really don't see the path where Oracle or Sun go their own way with a Java mobile device to take on the world.

> Some good bits but if the chance was so good with mobile Java why didn't he take it while he was still running Sun?

My thoughts as well. There wasn't much left to bungle considering the state in which Sun left JME.

Best quote from Schwartz: "We revoked that patent. I don't think it passed the red-face test. Patent litigation is not how I want to make a living. It's not the legacy I want to pass on to my children."

On "your name is on a patent [application] for charging per-person, per-year subscription payments for software. Are you going to go after Google now that they charge $50 per person per year for Google Apps? That could be a nice revenue stream for you."

Sun's CDDL license for the Solaris code was another big mistake. Notice how the linux dtrace port has to step around licensing issues here, https://github.com/ShepBook/dtrace-for-linux

Linux still does not have a good implementation of Dtrace, and other awesome Solaris tools.

Great interview and it makes me respect Schwartz even more. It takes balls to admit to mistakes at the level he was at, too.

Q: You were one of the prominent people involved in the Google-Oracle lawsuit [called by Google to testify]. For now, that case largely fell in Google's favor.

Schwartz: I'm not going to opine on who was right and who was wrong. ... I thought the outcome was fair and right.

Yes, I liked that one too. It came out so casually, the contradiction. Good interview. I like his assessment of where he went wrong and the opportunities that were lost, in addition to his general inclination towards doing the right thing (eg. the "red-face test").

95% great interview. Actually, the interview was pretty much 100% great, some of the answers were a little off the rails. I think we can all agree that "Schwartz: There's no question in my mind that market will heat up all over again... If you go to an employee and say, "You've got two choices. I'll give you an iPad or I'll give you that last-generation x86 box," they'll take an iPad. " doesn't pass the smell test, and, in hindsight, I bet Jonathan probably realizes he got a little over excited there.

I love my iPad - but, if I only get one system to do work every day, I'll suck it up and take that "last generation x86 box" - if only so I can run VMware, Microsoft Excel, Visio, Outlook, etc...

Maybe there will be a day in the future when I can get by with an iPad only - but until I can book resources in our corporate calendar, or run a virtualized OS (or three) on my iPad - the utility of an operating systems like Windows or OS X wins the day. But maybe I'm a dying breed of "Needs a truck" kind of guy...

A little funny to see him say that, since I think Oracle's inability to come up with a mobile platform beyond feature phones and the Google/Oracle lawsuit are both related to Sun's attempt to protect its J2ME licensing fees while he was the CEO.

I was under the impression - formed long before Oracle bought Sun - that Schwartz bungled Java's chance at mobile, particularly in how they dealt with Google. Oracle just inherited his mess.

Didn't Dan Lyons ("Fake Steve Jobs") once say the real target of his comedy was blogging CEOs and particularly Jonathan Schwartz?

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