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.'"

Comments

Cooperation or desperation

[breakbeatninja]

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.

Get with it!

[sillypixie]

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