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Slashdot reports Sun Pres says future of the Internet is on mobile phones.

In a speech in the heart of Silicon Valley SUn President Jonathan Schwartz called perosnal computers "relics" and said web services will be delivered on devices that go well beyond the desktop. This advocacy of using the Internet on mobile devices has got to be good news for Opera. Here is a snip from the ZDNET summary of his speech.

By Stephen Shankland ZDNET 9/23/05

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Increasingly, the personal computer is a relic.

So asserted Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker Sun Microsystems. Instead, what has become important are Web services on the Internet and the mobile phones most will use to access them, he argued at a Friday speech here at a meeting of the American India Foundation.

"The majority of the applications that will drive the next wave of innovation will be services, not applications that run on the desktop. The real innovation is occurring in the network and the network services," Schwartz said.

Sun, which sells the back-end infrastructure that powers such services, has promulgated variations of this message for years. But there's evidence the idea has some merit.

Schwartz points to the increasing wealth and power of companies, like eBay, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com, that profit from free services available over the network. Among his audience, many more people said they'd rather have access to Internet services than their desktop computing applications. And Microsoft--the company with the biggest financial stake in the PC software business--has struggled to cope with the arrival of Web services.

The threat to PCs is twofold. Not only are services moving to the network, Schwartz said, but PCs won't be the way people use those services--particularly in poorer areas of the world that have risen higher up Sun's corporate priority list. Instead, that access will come through mobile phones.