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Ballmer and McNealy Smiling Together
cahiha writes "Sun and Microsoft are pushing a single sign-on and identity management solution, and the Sun home page has a picture of McNealy and Ballmer smiling together. Yahoo has details on the conflict between the industry giants, and there is more information on the collaboration at the Sun press release page. The press release took place Friday morning." From the article: "The technology news, though, was overshadowed by the joint appearance of McNealy and Ballmer, who until April 2004 were bitter enemies. McNealy once referred to Microsoft's executive team of Ballmer and
Bill Gates as 'Beavis and Butthead.'"
Sun may be on its last legs. It's certainly not the juggernaut it was before the dot com bust. It is an advocate of open source, which is great, but they used to have a market capitalization of $130B, now they're trying to hold on to $13B http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SUNW&t=5y&l=on&z=m &q=l&c= and not having an easy time as their stock is in the single digits and investors are weary to put too much faith in to a company that may not have a bright future.
I personally hope this isn't the case, I have an old Ultra 10, Ultra 5, a few sparcstations and a sparcbook.. they're great machines. Perhaps a bit overpriced when they were shiny and new, but most exotic hardware is and that's one reason (others: see application availability) that x86 has been so successful- it's cheap. You can build a reliable, stable and fast server for pennies on the dollar on what you might spend on a Sunfire. Good luck, Scott.. you know better than any of us that Microsoft is a difficult company to deal with.. even in the mutual desperation both of your corporations are facing.
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You are wrong. Sun has completely turned around their product portfolio in the past several years, is actually gaining customers, and is financially better now than before.
People need to see the bigger picture of the identity management between Sun and Microsoft: SUN RAY. Sun will be able to provide access to Solaris, Linux, and Windows applications all through their thin clients. People who subscribe to a future Sun Ray service in their homes, will be able to access Windows apps on top of the GNOME desktop. If this is irrelevant, then just shoot me now.
Repeatedly, Sun has said they are pursuing all this, because Sun's customers are asking for it. People want this stuff.
Passport is dead, IIRC. Ballmer kept mentioning something called WS*. The interoperability will be between the open standards Liberty Alliance protocols and the Microsoft-proprietary protocols, and I think they mentioned Directory services interop, too. This is to allow Sun systems and Windows systems to co-exist in the same identity framework, which is a win for sysadmins everywhere.
Apparently, Trusted Solaris is the _only_ product some military installations can use. At their Q2 announcement, a company head spoke about how their business is based entirely on Sun's OS.
Cite me one place where Sun said the BSD cc would be in the OS forever.
Stupid assumptions on your part don't make Sun the bad guy. You might also let me know what other vendor was shipping a full featured cc with their OS at that time....as I recall the answer was none.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
It's hard to find much on the technology, but some info is here. Liberty continues to be a win mainly for the corporate IP lawyers as they work to find ways to share customer information between the fortune 500. Meanwhile, most of the WS-* stack is not in any standards committee, and thus not availble to free and open source projects. I think the identity system that actually catches on will be 100% FOSS - probably based on SAML 2.0 - and spring from the grassroots, rather than from some corporate entities that would like to be our "identity providers."
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
Everybody is focusing on those two guys smiling together, instead of looking at why they called the press release together, and why what they announced is considered important enough to warrant a Ballmer/McNealy co-presentation!
The reason why this is news, is that both companies, along with a ton of other groups of all sorts of sizes and purposes, have been working on creation of standards that will allow web authentication on the internet to cross boundaries of OS platform, browser platform, and development platform. The Metadata Exchange and Interop protocols are just two of a whole HOST of protocols that are going to link everything up.
Some of you will say - who cares? But the technology they are working on now will be used in the future by most people, on most platforms, to access protected web content.
That's pretty big. This little niche of the industry is set to explode into mainstream consciousness, just wait and see...
If you want to be ahead of the curve:
Check out the Fact Sheet from the MS-Sun announcement.
Check out the WS-* White Paper
Check out Microsoft's Vision For an Identity Metasystem
Check out the Liberty Alliance Technology Review
And if prefer blogs to White Papers, check out Kim Cameron's Blog. That's really the happening place in Identity Management right now...
Pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
When $200 gets you a really nice commodity PC, there's no real point.
Sun Rays have no moving parts. What's the MTBF on your $200 PC across a company with thousands of desktops? How many dime-store hard drive failures, cheap-o motherboard failures, and non-ECC RAM failures can you handle and still feel your money was well spent?
Sun Rays also seem to have no built-in obselescence. One Sun exec at the press conference says his Sun Ray is from 1997 and still works.