Making sense The beachhead makes sense for the power company and its customers. They want to move the focal point away from custom-coded applications and rely on services provided by a server. The OSGI consortium was announced at the beginning of March, and it includes a hefty list of industry heavyweights - Sun, Oracle, Cable and Wireless, Ericsson, to name a few. Microsoft is among those who are conspiciously absent. But the OSGI was formed around the Ericsson project, which created the e-box about a year ago.
Somebody has to take responsibility for the whole system.
It belongs to the operator, they hold the line. It is a service business. The company has started six small-scale trials of the box in Norway and Sweden, where home users are just starting to link up to wider networks. But Ericsson realized that for its box and its dream of e-services, it needed to groom other developers. For Sun, anything that invites creation of Java-compliant devices is good.