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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.'"
The Four Horsemen have been sighted today in an undisclosed location...
The Crimson Dragon
....bend over and take it like a bitch!
Now if they can only cooperate and get their darn keyboards to have similar layouts! I mean seriously, who would have the caps lock key where shift is? Ridiculous.
Microsoft, on the other hand, needs to look more "open" and more "willing to play nicely with competitors". What better way than to find a half-dead ex-competitor, one that won't pose any serious challenge, and start cooperating with them. Maybe this will appease those EU anti-trust people.
Microsoft appears to be jumping too quickly getting between "good company" and "bad company" personalities, while Sun's "we're independent and answer to no-one" and "yeah, but we did get $2bn from our biggest competitor" vibrations are reaching breaking point.
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.
shop.envescent.com - Computer hardware and more.
It's a trick. Get an axe.
When I read news that these two companies are working together so that their respective office suites can seamlessly open each others documents, then I will be suitably impressed.
All this "sign-on" and "identity management" thing is all well and good, but IMHO the home user will benefit more immediately and palpably with interoperability between suites/programs. Maybe Microsoft will actually become "standards compliant" soon....
For every present, there is a past
So in desperation, Sun is reaching for a life preserver made of cast iron.
Of course, this could be an entirely new, unworkable "a single sign-on and identity management solution," that will be just as distrusted and irrelevant as Passport was. People don't even trust Microsoft to handle their e-mail without infecting their machine, much less keeping their "identity" secure.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is im-possible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and jus-tice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. Adam Smith, the "Wealth of Nations" What goes around comes around. Steve
This is about what Digital was doing at this point in their death spiral. The pilot hasn't told the passengers the situation... When I die, I want to die in my sleep, like my Grandfather did, and not like the 500 screaming passengers on his plane.
Next year when MS starts screwing Sun, Sun will complain and be told: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Steve doesn't do the Monkey dance.
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.
I shudder to say this in many ways, but some good could actually come out of this if Sun and Microsoft could get some cooperation happening on Java (or more generally a unified runtime and API). Sun may be near irrelevant but Java is in many ways the main competitor to Microsoft's broad development platform (is it still called .NET?)
Putting aside the important considerations around free/open software, it could make a lot of people's lives simpler. Its not that Java isn't already rich and cross platform, it would just be a next step in unification and perhaps make development for small devices for example easier.
But due to their contexts, I wouldn't fully trust either company, and especially both, to carry the flag for a unified development environment, just like I'm sure this latest cooperation will yield to some selling out of purely technical or ethical concerns. "Liberty Alliance" (groan) appeared to be much more important than MS' solution, with much more real third party participation, so this is a consolidation that will have repurcussions. The third party opinions and participation of interested parties like geeks is still important to prevent sneaking in designs intended purely for the benefit of MS and Sun, rather than contributing to developments that are generally useful.
Yeah, or the poison dart in Ballmer's. This makes me think back to seeing Reagan and Gorbachev on TV, shaking hands and appearing to agree on something important. Unnerving, and not a little creepy.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
.........at least not in their homepage
What if some of these ideas are part correct? If Sun is looking to cooperate on single sign-on, or other issues of compatability, as well as cozy up to OSS and standards, that would put Sun in between two vitreous opponents. Its always been helpful to me to try to see what this behavior would benefit the actor.
/.-ers of the world. I think that highend graphics might have been much slower in coming along if it hadn't been for gamers and tech-heads. There are other examples where leading edge or application specific adaptations became standard issue and were lead by the early adaptors. Perhaps this lesson hasn't eluded some of the industry's big players? This Linux thing and the 'free' and OSS might just not be going away any time soon?
By being compatible with Windows, Sun keeps vitality in the enterprise domain. By working with F/OSS they keep vitality in the home pc domain. Now, vitality in this case may mean only survivability. None the less, it keeps Sun active on two fronts in the software wars.
If both Sun and Microsoft develop single sign-on and other compatability efforts, surely the F/OSS world will gain from this?
If Sun is attacking Microsoft's grip on the software industry by playing both sides against the middle, they stand to gain in the aftermath of any battle over any facet of software in the general marketplace. Someone has to end up making money from all this F/OSS effort. RedHat is not doing too badly, and there seems to be room for at least one more *nix player in the Enterprise domain.
This of course might be totally wrong, but I can see big iron vendors spending much more time working with F/OSS and at the same time, not starting any new battles head-on with Microsoft.
There is a certain danger to ignoring the
SCO seems to have made itself irrelevant by playing things the old school way. It didn't go well for them. Perhaps this is also written on the board room walls at Sun? Billion dollar lawsuits are not very popular these days.
Whatever the outcome, it looks to me like F/OSS is having a positive effect on the software industry as a whole, and we can now see very big vendors trying to find a place in the new marketplace of the software industry.
The one thing that I think will make a *nix distribution stable enough for the Enterprise market is the backing / support of a very big vendor that already knows how to make enterprise class software and computing systems. There is still room for a Solaris in the enterprise, and if 10 installed a bit better with more support for my hardware, I'd be running it at home.
I personally would like to see Sun make a better offering in the free OS realm. Solaris is a very stable OS, despite any objections that some might have. I'd definitely test anything that Sun supports or assists with.
If they can work out the wrinkles with Microsoft, and keep things stable for a bit, it seems possible that Sun could be working to pull off the theft of a bigger marketshare from Microsoft.
Just my thoughts.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Taking another cue from the upstart in Cupertino, Microsoft and Sun announced today that work is underway on a new vapor of Windows based on Solaris for high end workstations in scientific computing and multimedia production. It will have the familliar interface of Windows XP with a few snazzy extras, but the underpinnings will be made of Sun's industrial strength Solaris version of Unix. It will be available first on Sun branded Opteron workstations and servers.
The hardware platform, designed by Sun, will be the most advanced PC architecture yet. It will only support PCI-X or USB2 peripherals, and will repair itself. Scott McNealy says "We have actually trained [capuchin] monkeys who are administering our development servers right now. This drives down the TCO to the tune of nuts and berries in addition to the initial purchase cost."
The development environment for the platform is based on Dot Net, with a Sun licensed Java extension so that developers can write programs in Visual Basic, Java, or C# which will only run on the new environment. The new tools are being developed offshore in Hindi and Mandarin with english versions not due out for up to two years later.
The product is codenamed WinX (pronounced "Whence?"), and will be available at the same time Longhorn is released, probably later this year and will be much, much cooler than Apple's highly touted Tiger version of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs' reacted: "In the kitchen, Microsoft only knows how to make a shit sandwich, and they keep making bigger and bigger ones. Unfortunately, if we want to eat we all have to take a bite. I think they know that, and that's why I suggested Steve [Ballmer] reclaim the name 'Wince' from the handheld market. That's what it makes me want to do! He [Ballmer] laughed."
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Stallman: The dark side of the Source is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... free (as in beer and in freedom).
n00b: Is it possible to learn those powers?
Stallman: Not from a MSCE.
It is for SHOUTING.
But seriously, you have to go back to the old mechanical typewriters, where shift literally shifted the mechanism vertically so that the uppercase portion of the strikers hit the ribbon. The Caps Lock was actually a little mechanical lock that held the shift lever down.
There was also no Enter/Return key. You slapped a big lever up on the carriage, which rotated the drum up a line, and then transferred you slap to the carriage to move it back to the right.
You also had to strike the keys, as you were mechanically moving a striker up to hit the ribbon over the paper. If you pushed them, you'd get no, or a light strike.
And you tried to type 'teh', you'd probably end up with a mechanical snarl.
When you learned typing, they would have typewriters with no letters on the key caps. You couldn't hunt and peck if you wanted to. I wonder if they even teach typing on mechanical or electric typewriters anymore.
Software isn't so trivial. There's support staff expertise to build, there's a customer base to build, etc. It isn't like customers like seeing one company vaporize to have another one spring up and say "hey, over here, folks!"
"Free software gives the power to the software engineer."
Not really. We still live in a society where people have to make money. This means working for a company doing their software development or consulting, which usually doesn't mesh with the software engineer's own ideals.
The idealism behind the FSF is good, but it has its limits.
I know that most folks are familiar with the Linux vs. Windows debate but look who could get replaced easier....Solaris.
A case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Maybe......
Oh hold on, this is not coming from the Cannes festival...
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
Q. Who are the two ugliest CEOs in IT?
Almost seriously... they put a photo on the front page and they couldn't find a better one?
I won't even think about the ethical and technical side of things. We're obviously doomed.
Actually, Ballmer has his had FIRMLY gripping McNealy's nut sack. I smell a buyout soon...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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
Besides, browsers such as Mozilla already have the capability of storing your login info -- LOCALLY, UNDER YOUR CONTROL, not at some distant and super major coropration.
Well, the choice is yours, folks. Centralized login, and all that implies, or decentralized and less vunerable to comprimise.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Without Sun and Solaris, development would have continued on systems from DEC, HP, or any of the dozen or so other *nix vendors around at the time.
Solaris' popularity didn't make it indispensible.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The only reason people work for companies is lack of imagination.
Of course, there's no shortage of lack of imagination.
Gee, that sounds like a Bushism!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
In other news, McNeally and Ballmer have also been trying to figure out a way to make Hell hotter and are currently developing STH technology: a way to make people's first mistake send them straight to Hell. Evil never sleeps, folks!
BANG!
But seriously, people have been talking about thin clients for a decade, and they never took off. When $200 gets you a really nice commodity PC, there's no real point. The monitor ends up costing you more than the PC. It surprises me even more that you're talking about home users. Why would a home user want to pay money every month to have access to part of a CPU, and access it via an unreliable and/or slow internet connection?
I can understand the motivation in an academic or corporate setting for wanting to use thin clients so you can cut down on support costs. But that was true 10 years ago, and it never got popular. For one thing, it may just be more efficient to give the user some control over his machine, so he can get his work done. Also, if you really want to lock down the machines on your network so lusers can't infect them with viruses, install limewire, etc., there are cheaper ways to do that than to buy an overpriced thin client from Sun. It's just a matter of software. For example, the computers in the labs at my school get their hard disks automatically reimaged every so often.
Find free books.
This is an excellent point. If anyone should be running business (or society in general), it should be the scientists, artists and academics. They are typically not blinded by avarice in the sameway that the average businessman is. Profit is useful, but it should never be the main motivation for doing something. The main motivation should be the further development of mankind so that the totality of the species may expand beyond the confines of our primitive solar system. The improvements to our cultures should not only be in the technology arena, but also in social and behavioral aspects. The goal should be to stamp out fear, greed and selfishness and replace them with a thirst for knowledge, a deeper understanding of the benefits of cooperation over competition, and a strong awareness of our responsibility to those around us.
Sadly, we have let our society be taken over by the common criminal's desire for material wealth with no reasonable limits. Fortunately, not everyone thinks this way and many of us attempt to rise above that archaic mode of thinking. We see the value in cooperation and how making top dollar does little to further the species. Capitalism has served it's purpose, but it is not scaling well as the means of information production becomes ubiquitous. IP laws and software patents are not there to protect you unless you are a big enough software business to afford the lawyers. This is not right or just. Source code is merely the analogue to a recipe, the compilers, linkers, etc... are the cooking utensils. No one has set out to restrict what you can cook, so why should they restrict what you write for your computer? Is it illegal to make a hamburger at home? Did McDonald's set out to keep people from stealing the hmburger from their virttual monopoly? No. So all this talk of software patents is pure rubbish and legal tacticsto keep the power inthe richest hands. The time has come to destroy this system of control. I plan to continue writing code in any way I see fit in order to do what I need to do with my machines. No corporations are going to stop me even if they wish to brand me a criminal. Sometimes you just have to stand up for what you believe in. I believe that computers are tools and my ideas are free.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Sun is microsoft's new pawn in the server market. Microsoft's excuse not be be labeled a monopoly if/when they become a bigger force in the server market. By keeping Sun alive, microsoft will have a controlled competitor in the market. Exactly what microsoft turned apple into years ago by buying nonvoting stock in apple. does anyone else see this?
Microsoft is notorious for standards incompatibility from OS to IE to Office Doc Formats. This announcement is about interoperability thru standards support in the Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture. I believe that the WS standards are the key to the next level of integration with IT. This not only translates to lower cost of development and ownership of codebases but also begins to provide the next evolution of identity management, a pink elephant in service application industry.
I find your stereotype wrong.
Who is there to blame but DEC for believing Microsoft lies rather than innovating on their business model and attitudes and trying to get ahead of the train again.
There were actual signs hanging above engineer's desks "We're DEC and you are not." and the attitude was pervasive.
They were never willing to go with something new that was not thought of, developed, patented, and otherwise controlled by DEC.
Small wonder when they needed an answer, they thought it would be someone like Microsoft.
I spent many years in the depths of DEC hardware and software, but good riddance. They would have become just like Microsoft or worse had they been able, because they were controlling the hardware as well. It is just too bad that no one picked up the Alpha chip or any number of other good technologies that they were somehow unable or unwilling to bring to the masses.
No, you stated that it couldn't have happened otherwise.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That said, I think Microsoft sees themself on a precarious perch. They think they keep their domination of the desktop by denying the average customer freedom of choice. Go to a Best Buy or browse Dell.com. We only see Microsoft boxen.
Microsoft has been better at forcing us to use Microsoft products than geting us to want to use Microsoft products. As a result Microsoft is not exaclty loved by a large part of it's customer base. The Microsoft partisans see the resentment even though they attribute it to jealousy of Microsofts success instead of a reaction to Microsoft's actions.
So far Microsoft has been successful at killing potential threats. When Netscape and Java were seen as potential OS independent platform Microsoft cut off Netscape's "air supply."
When BeOS was around Microsoft prohibited the Box Makers from configuring dual boot boxes from being truely dual boot!
It has been easy for Micosoft to kill off these single company threats.
Why has has Microsoft been able to tell the box makers what to do. If 95% of the business of a box maker is Microsoft boxes, then they have to do an Microsoft says.
I am sure that Microsoft fears the possibility of an alternative such as Linux getting enough market share that some Box Makers could tell Microsoft to bugger off. I am sure they fear this scenario. And Linux can not be killed by cutting off a company's "air supply."
But I think the fear is unfounded. I think most people would stick with Windows even if they had Linux boxes next to the Windows boxes at Best Buy.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
If anyone should be running business (or society in general), it should be the scientists, artists and academics.
I'd much rather see a business man in charge of a business (or society in general). It's bad enough when scientists, artists and academics run a business you've invested in, right into the ground, but that's nothing compared to the horrors of the "theocracies" they've lead. Even in spite of their intentions, a realist is usually more benign then an idealist.
They are typically not blinded by avarice in the sameway that the average businessman is.
Perhaps, but in my experience scientists, artists and academics tend to be worse than blinded, perhaps by higher ideals and are all the scarier for it. That said, corporations are truely inhuman, but that it less about businessmen and more about the laws that require them to put profit ahead of all else.
The time has come to destroy this system of control.
I agree that there are some changes that need to be made for the betterment of all mankind, but after havinbg read about "[your] struggle", I think I will be forwarding your text to the Department of Homeland Security.
Have a nice day.
That's not true, you know. Sometimes people work for companies because of lack of motivation, sometimes lack of capital, sometimes fear, sometimes a combination of these things.
And maybe there are some people who actually LIKE working for companies. Maybe they like the relative security, the human contact, the culture, the well-defined role and responsibility.
The world needs more and better entrepreneurs but lets be serious, not everyone can be, or should be, an entrepreneur.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
How the mighty have fallen, poor bastards - how I remember the sun of a decade ago, how strong, innovative and proud they once were.
For them to be reduced to to this, kissing up to the peecee monopolist, is a saddening spectacle. IMHO it's a sign that sun is not long for this world, at least not the sun that we know.
We've seen the pattern repeated in the past, with one hapless company after another lining up for the same treatment, getting in bed with microsoft, taking a wad of cash and giving up far more than they realize, fading into irrelavance shortly thereafter.
Sun, it was good to know you - although we didn't always see eye to eye, it can't be denied that you contributed a lot to the internet and the unix community.
R.I.P.
Hey, McNealy IS right!
Ball and Gates do remind me of Beavis and Buthead.
Ballmer: "Huh, we're like cool or something?"
Gates: "Yeah, we're cool, heih. Are you threatening me??"
I think the real point is not to trust ANY person with power, in which case, that's actually good advice. Nonetheless, "not trusting" is not the same as "is evil".
BTW "person with power" == Linus, RMS, Red Hat as well as Sun, IBM, etc. If you blindly follow ANY leader, you're a fool.
But clearly the zealots can't get it through their thick heads that demonizing Sun, or IBM, or BitKeeper is no different from demonizing RMS and the FSF. Just as not-reality-based.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001