Does Sun want to play Intel to Google’s Microsoft?
A little snippet from Jonathan Schwartz’ article about the Sun-Google partnership announcement caught my attention (the emphasis is mine):
“I’d recommend you watch Eric [Schmidt's] opening speech during yesterday morning’s festivities – in which he talks about Google being built atop an open, neutral, interoperable network.”
Uh… like… isn’t this how Intel, Microsoft, and Dell pretty much kicked everybody’s ass with Wintel?
The PC is also an open, neutral, interoperable hardware platform.
Microsoft advocated this open hardware platform and built a software platform that is anything but open, neutral, and interoperable on top. Dell became the supplier of that open hardware platform. And Intel managed to secure a position as the “sole” supplier of a critical component to that open hardware platform.
Will Google, like Microsoft, build a “closed” platform on top of the open, neutral, and interoperable network platform that Google advocates?
Does Sun play the part of Intel, Dell, both, or neither in the network platform? (Jonathan Schwartz is a professed fan of commodity businesses and Dell kicks ass selling a commodity.)
Is Sun a hardware supplier in this story or are Java and Open Office the analogues to Intel’s microprocessors and Dell’s commodity PCs?