McNealy urges OEMs to take care with MS

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy has warned OEMs that Microsoft will compete with them even if they adopt its technology.

McNealy was speaking to an audience of people from chip-using industries at an OEM electronics summit in San Francisco last week. The software giant's biggest critic told them: 'Microsoft is a dangerous partner. What it did to PC makers, it will do to consumer electronics firms.'

He warned OEM manufacturers that Intel and Microsoft are too concerned with their own branding, upgrade paths and pricing to be good partners.

Naturally, McNealy said that Sun only wants to design products quickly and sell them cheaply without any interest in 'global domination'.

He said Java is the best software choice for consumer and handheld electronic devices, claiming that Windows CE is not as scalable and is not compatible with other Windows operating systems.

Sun's Javasoft unit has posted a draft specification for its Java Mail application programming interface (API) to enable developers to build email-enabled applications in Java and add mail features to existing packages written in Java. The API, co-developed with Netscape, Lotus, IBM and Novell, will work with existing email protocols such as IMAP and SMTP.