I’m going to start off with a comment that Rich Unger left on one of my previous posts, in which I snidely derided Sun’s (and Java’s) money-making capabilities. Rich said, “As Sun software executives love to point out, Java is one of the only things at Sun that does make money. They license it to small device (e.g. phone) manufacturers, they bundle MS/Yahoo/whatever toolbar with the JRE, and get paid ridiculously too much for that. It’s actually profitable.” That’s fair enough! But I thought about that when I saw blog post from Larry Dignan at ZDNet. Larry quotes a J.P. Morgan analyst who in turn quotes unnamed Sun folks who say that Oracle “may be primarily in developing/sustaining the end markets for their middleware technology, rather than increasing the direct monetization of Java.” This is shored up by cited IDC estimates that peg Sun’s Java-related billings at $220 million, and Oracle’s middleware income at $2.3 billion.That order of magnitude difference is, of course, at the heart of why Oracle is buying Sun and not vice-versa. But it’s also worth noting that Oracle’s Java middleware occupies a pretty different part of the Java ecosystem than JRE toolbars and Java ME licensing. Thus, it’s open to question how much focus initiatives like those will get from Oracle. Without them, though, we are left to wonder what purpose, exactly, Java serves to Oracle — as a fancy in-house language for its software? Have they decided that they were so invested in the stuff for their middleware that they simply had to own it — or at least couldn’t allow IBM to own it? If that’s the case, then Java’s advance — or at least the part of the advance paid for by Oracle — might be of interest to a fairly limited group of people from here on in. Technology Industry