Sun “owned” Java mobile, J2ME, but to increase its popularity, made it as open as possible. Initially, the tech, embedded, and mobile communities were attracted to Java. But soon they wanted to extend its capabilities. The result was chaos, forks, fragmentation, divergent phone capabilities, and a lot of energy was lost to entropy as a result.

If Sun had a tighter hand at the helm, they could have steered J2ME to much greater success. One need look no further than to benevolent dictator Qualcomm, whose competing BREW technology came with a mandatory ecosystem and a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude.

While Java technology was great, and remains heavily used, BREW fared much better than J2ME as an ecosystem.

Thanks for this perspective and the link to Charlie Kindel’s post, which I had not seen.

I agree with one of the commenters on Charlie’s post that Google is building up and positioning Chrome as the branded ecosystem/experience that they control. One that is more palatable to the enterprise buyer. Play will be Google’s consumer brand, with Android continuing as an important technology, but disappearing as a brand (for Google).

^^^We could very likely see two lines of offerings (tablets, phones, apps market) from Google in the future. A consumer-grade, lower-priced Play line minimally controlled by Google and an enterprise-ready, premium-priced one that is branded Chrome and tightly controlled by Google. The latter will also include laptops and desktops (as it does now with Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.)^^^