The Ovum View: Sun's accidental asset - Java, the consumer brand

Millions of mobile phone users are now familiar with the word Java and know it's nothing to do with the island or coffee. So is Sun thinking of one its main weapons in overly complex, overly enterprise-centric terms, asks Ovum principal analyst John Delaney...

At Sun's worldwide analyst conference the other week, CEO Scott McNealy made a comment along the lines of 'We're not a consumer brand, and we never will be'. I started to wonder whether this was really true. With regard to the brand 'Sun', of course, it was little more than a statement of the obvious. But Sun has built another brand which not only commands wide recognition in the IT and telecoms communities but is also starting to gain recognition among consumers too. The brand is 'Java'.

Java is a programming language. Consumers don't care about programming languages. So why are they starting to become aware of Java, while remaining blissfully unaware of C++, Visual Basic and so on? It's because through J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), increasing numbers of people are starting to come across the word 'Java' on the screens of their mobile phones.

And they're starting to build some positive associations with the word 'Java'. On Vodafone Live! phones, for example, the games list is divided into two. One is labelled 'Games', the other is labelled 'Java games'. The Java games are the ones with fancier graphics, 3D effects and animations. So users are seeing 'Java', and they're finding that it means, in this context, 'cooler'. They have no idea that it's the name of a programming language. And a good thing too.

The thing is this: all this is mostly happening by accident. The word 'Java' has slipped through the net. Having been badly burned by their WAP experiences, mobile operators have learned a mantra: 'sell services, not technologies'. They now want MMS, SMS, GPRS, CDMA 1XRTT and all the rest of the alphabet soup to be hidden from their subscribers.

And they're right: that's how it should be. But sometimes, the user interface designers forget to screen out technology names, and that's what has happened with Java.

Crucially, Java is not an acronym – it's a friendly-sounding word. And in an increasing number of people's minds, it's becoming associated with fun, leading-edge entertainment.

So what? Well, in Java, Sun now has a powerful brand, and a brand is a potentially lucrative asset. The tricky bit, for Sun, is to figure out how to turn it into money. The company doesn't make much money directly on J2ME at present. It charges licence fees from phone vendors like Motorola and Nokia but it doesn't charge developers anything to write applications for J2ME. That's why there are hundreds of thousands of developers doing just that. This presents Sun with a problem, so far as the most obvious way to monetise J2ME is concerned. If they charge developers to use it, they remove the main factor that has contributed to its success. Hmm… tricky one.

But while Sun is figuring that conundrum out, here's something simple that they could do right now: stop calling it 'J2ME' and start calling it 'Java' again. When you have a good brand, the last thing you should do is bury it in an acronym. It's obviously a good idea to have different editions of Java for enterprise servers, desktop computers and mobile phones, since the needs of each device class are so different. But why call them J2EE, J2SE and J2ME? Technology companies do love their acronyms, don't they? Instead, why not call them, say, 'Java Enterprise', 'Java Desktop' and 'Java Mobile'?

In fact, while we're on the subject of re-naming, since far more people have heard of Java than have ever heard of Sun, maybe they should start to think about changing the name of the company to 'Java'? Just a thought.

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