Did Scott McNealy of Sun just make peace with an enemy, surrender, or cry for help?The two enemies have agreed to bury the hatchet. Microsoft will pay Sun almost $2 billion to settle Sun's pending antitrust lawsuit against it, to resolve patent issues and to pay in advance for some licensing royalties. For Microsoft, which has some $53 billion in cash, this is peanuts. For Sun, whose credit rating was cut to junk last month by Standard & Poor's, it is most welcome. Longer term, the two firms have agreed to make their technologies compatible and, more generally, to play nice. Large companies invariably have in their data-centres both Sun's fancy network-server computers and also cheaper machines running Windows. And they all have Windows on their employees' desktop computers. These need to talk smoothly to all the servers in the basement, but often do not. So customers are increasingly annoyed at the complexity of making the various technologies work together.
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Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld "All views expressed are my personal views are not related in any way to my employer"
