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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
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
Maybe a quote from the OTHER "A. Smith" is more appropriate here...
Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
Oh hold on, this is not coming from the Cannes festival...
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.
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.
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.