Sun's role in the grand scheme of development is to work on the runtime environment and the APIs. The tools we produce are much more for systems programmers, not enterprise developers.
Quotes about runtime (5 Quotes)
The industry is beginning to acknowledge that there are different parts of governance that need to be understood and runtime is as important as design time. You want to catch things at design time if you can, but there are other policies have to be enforced by data flowing through system rather than the nature of program code and that's a worthy goal.
I think we'll finally find out what Sparkle is about, ... Is it Flash-like, a runtime or animation tool It's not clear, but definitely it will compete with Macromedia and Adobe in some manner.
You can't operate an application that's mission-critical without the full runtime environment that gives you reliable, highly available and scale applications with all the things you've come to expect -- load balancing and fail-over support and management tools,
There was some discussion about what runtime APIs applications Apple would support, whether they would support some of ours or some of Sun's.