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

In other news.....

[Crimson Dragon]

The Four Horsemen have been sighted today in an undisclosed location...

Keyboards!

[CRepetski]

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.

Re:Keyboards!

[Yallis]

nONSENSE1

Why is this headline news?

[QuietLagoon]

Sun is on the verge of becoming irrelevant (if they haven't done so already). Their marketshare is declining almost as rapidly as their stock price. McNealy is looking around for a life boat, and he thinks he has found one in Microsoft.

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.

I thought Passport was dead

[Nova Express]

Is it just me, or does "a single sign-on and identity management solution" sound an awful lot like Passport? I was under the impression that once eBay told them to take a hike, the long-shunned Passport was finally going to be given the ignoble burial it deserves.

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.

Similar Reactions

[buckhead_buddy]

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.

Re:Similar Reactions

[astrashe]

I think the divide is between free as in freedom and everyone else.

I've been using linux for a long time, since about '92. (I should be a lot better at it than I am -- I'm not claiming any kind of geek mastery over it.)

And for almost all of that time it's been about the software and not the license. I always thought the free software fanatics were, well, fanatics. Ideologues.

I don't think that any more. In the end, the only software that's perfectly alined with its users' interests is open source.

It's usually not described in these terms, but defining characteristic of open source is that the owners or creators have given away their ability to control how people use the software.

Out of the big guys in silicon valley, gates is probably one of the better ones. Personally, I'd rather hang out with him than with Jobs. I always imagine Jobs sitting in a chair with disciples gathered around his feet. Ellison must be a nightmare.

Gates is the worst only because he's the biggest and most powerful. If Jobs was the biggest and most powerful, he'd be the worst.

I used to run a business on sparc servers. I like Sun and their technology. But Sun is looking out for Sun, and they always will, and if it's in their interests to throw me under the train, they will.

Debian *can't* throw me under the train. They've signed away all the rights they'd need to be able to do it.

It's not about whether or not the guys at the top are good or bad. It's that they're in roles that simply shouldn't exist. That's the problem with google's ambitious plans. The guys who run google are great -- they probably go out on sunday's and wash the feet of the poor. But they're amassing a lot of power over information, and the mass itself isn't a good thing.

Re:Being a loyal DEC user

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Sun's exit plan.

[team99parody]

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.

Revenge of the Shit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.