“Microsoft and Sun redrew the battle lines in the computing world Friday, with news of a 10-year pact designed to better integrate the leading proprietary Unix and Windows platforms and unifying the rivals against a common enemy–IBM and Linux,” Paula Rooney and Barbara Darrow report for CRN. “During a brief press conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Sun CEO Scott McNealy–megarivals whose companies have battled fiercely in the operating system market for more than 20 years–pledged to make their platforms and respective development tools interoperate.”
Rooney and Darrow report, “The wide-ranging pact calls for seamless interoperability between Windows and Solaris Unix operating systems and Java and .Net development platforms. It also ends Sun’s aggressive antitrust litigation against Microsoft and transfers $1.6 billion of the $55 billion in Microsoft’s war chest to Sun, which has seen its profit margins battered by the growth of Linux on Intel servers.”
“‘The deal is an unholy alliance that spells the end of Sun Microsystems as we know it. This move makes Sun the Apple Computer of the Unix world. Apparently, McNealy thinks the enemy of his enemy–Linux–is his friend. They couldn’t possibly be more wrong,’ said Ron Herardian, CEO of Global System Services, Mountain View, Calif. ‘It’s just an unbelievable disaster for the industry. This won’t stop Linux; it just puts Sun on the losing side of the battle line,'” CRN reports.
Full article here.