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Ballmer and McNealy Smiling Together

Posted by Zonk on from the will-wonders-never-cease dept.

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.'"

3 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Similar Reactions by buckhead_buddy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There was a similar wave of shock and disbelief among Apple fanatics back in August of 1997 when Steve Jobs announced at MacWorld that Microsoft would be buying a stake in Apple. His message of "The desktop wars are over. Microsoft won. Get over it." were not what the crowd was expecting.

    • The little $150 million of money dribbled into Apple to protect them from hostile take-over.
    • The mutual patent cross-licensing.
    • The sharing of code bases for Java.
    • The decision to make Internet Explorer the standard Mac browser.
    • The promise to continue to make Microsoft Office products for the Mac for at least a year.

    These were huge unexpected changes, but none of these had the visceral impact of seeing Bill Gates on a huge screen over the auditorium and smiling and saying that we're chums with Apple now and that "Microsoft wants Apple to succeed." People were hissing and booing and making overt signs that the apocolypse for Apple had just arrived.

    It turns out that either there were other unannounced benefits for Apple or these back room agreements with Microsoft had an even for significant impact because they had very positve results for Apple. But even today, Apple fans still cringe when they see their "resistence fighter" being chummy with one of the leaders of the "Microsoft establishment".

    For Sun devotees, it's probably an equally unsettling bit of public relations. But lets hope that Microsoft gave up quite a bit more in those smokey back room deals that will benefit Sun, now that Sun appears to have come out of the closet at a full-blown "friend of Microsoft" now.

  2. Re:Being a loyal DEC user by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember attending the last DEC user meeting in LA (Oct 1998, I think) right before Compaq took them over. DEC was all agog about how closely they were working with Microsoft to make VMS more compatible with Windows and Microsoft's offerings.

  3. Sun's exit plan. by team99parody · · Score: 5, Interesting
    McNealy is looking around for a life boat, and he thinks he has found one in Microsoft.

    I think it's more than that. I think McNealey's not having fun anymore, and hasn't enjoyed himself since the .com bubble. He sees that Jonathan Schwartz sucks as a leader (offends people everytime he opens his mouth), and just wants a way out.

    There aren't many ways out for a company the size of Sun; one is being bought by IBM, another is being bought by Microsoft, another is being bought by Fujitsu. I can't think of anyone else out there that would even want them.

    Methinks Scott is hoping to sell the thing off and retire.