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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.
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.
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.
Maybe a quote from the OTHER "A. Smith" is more appropriate here...
Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
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