Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Sun Microsystems Microsoft Technology IT

Ballmer and McNealy Smiling Together 278

Posted by Zonk from the will-wonders-never-cease dept.
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.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ballmer and McNealy Smiling Together More

Ballmer and McNealy Smiling Together

Comments Filter:

  • In other news..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Crimson Dragon ( 809806 ) * on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:23PM (#12536100) Homepage
    The Four Horsemen have been sighted today in an undisclosed location...
    • The Four Horsemen have been sighted today in an undisclosed location...

      They have to bring Ellison in to complete the quad.

    • Re:In other news..... (Score:4, Funny)

      by themoodykid ( 261964 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:09PM (#12536453) Journal
      There's been change in plans. It's now six horsemen [engadget.com].
  • ....bend over and take it like a bitch!

  • Keyboards! (Score:5, Funny)

    by CRepetski ( 824321 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:25PM (#12536118)
    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.
    • May I ask what the point of caps lock was in the first place, as it doesn't make much sense to me?

      • Re:Keyboards! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by BasilBrush ( 643681 )
        THE REASON THERE IS A CAPS LOCK KEY

        Caps lock is on the keyboard because there used to be a shift lock on a typewriter keyboard. It was on the typewriter keyboard because there were only two ways of providing emphasis on a typewriter, ALL CAPS and underline. So you quite often typed a lot of capitals in a sequence.

        But the trouble with shift lock is that you ended up typing $^&***&^% when you got to any numbers. Shift lock only makes sense when applied to letters, and so the caps lock was born on

      • Typewriters! (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It is for SHOUTING.

        But seriously, you have to go back to the old mechanical typewriters, where shift literally shifted the mechanism vertically so that the uppercase portion of the strikers hit the ribbon. The Caps Lock was actually a little mechanical lock that held the shift lever down.

        There was also no Enter/Return key. You slapped a big lever up on the carriage, which rotated the drum up a line, and then transferred you slap to the carriage to move it back to the right.

        You also had to strike the ke

    • Re:Keyboards! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Yallis ( 759425 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:45PM (#12536274) Homepage
      nONSENSE1

  • Why is this headline news? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:26PM (#12536127)
    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.

    • Re:Why is this headline news? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You are wrong. Sun has completely turned around their product portfolio in the past several years, is actually gaining customers, and is financially better now than before.

      People need to see the bigger picture of the identity management between Sun and Microsoft: SUN RAY. Sun will be able to provide access to Solaris, Linux, and Windows applications all through their thin clients. People who subscribe to a future Sun Ray service in their homes, will be able to access Windows apps on top of the GNOME des

      • thin clients? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bcrowell ( 177657 )
        People need to see the bigger picture of the identity management between Sun and Microsoft: SUN RAY. Sun will be able to provide access to Solaris, Linux, and Windows applications all through their thin clients. People who subscribe to a future Sun Ray service in their homes, will be able to access Windows apps on top of the GNOME desktop. If this is irrelevant, then just shoot me now.
        BANG!

        But seriously, people have been talking about thin clients for a decade, and they never took off. When $200 gets you

        • Re:thin clients? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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.
      • Sun has completely turned around their product portfolio in the past several years

        Uh, yeah. They're now a Linux/AMD shop and can't figure out what to do with Slolaris. Yeah, they're financially better the same way that Carly was good for HP - they layed off anything that gave them intellectual property because it's easier to be a commodity seller.

        The funniest thing is their OS strategy - lay off their OS engineers and hope the open source community will build their OS for them, and perhaps Sun'll ju

    • Being a loyal DEC user (Score:5, Insightful)

      by expro ( 597113 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:45PM (#12536272)
      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.

      • Re:Being a loyal DEC user (Score:5, Interesting)

        by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:54PM (#12536344)
        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 may be dieing, but it still has a military contract. They will stay alive for a little while longer.

    • Sun's exit plan. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by team99parody ( 880782 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:57PM (#12536364) Homepage
      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.

    • Well, calling Sun a "half-dead ex-competitor" is a little strong, considering Microsoft's .NET doesn't have near the market share as Sun's Java. Sun's Open Office is the #1 competitor to Microsoft Office.

      Basically, Sun competes against MS on application development, web development, and office suites. All those are critical to Microsoft; that is nothing to be minimalized.

      • Sun's Open Office is the #1 competitor to Microsoft Office.

        That's not saying a whole hell of a lot, is it? I mean what's #3, wordpervert office? Garbage, pure garbage. I like openoffice and I use it on a regular basis but microsoft orifice is by far the leading office suite and will continue to be in that position until Windows is no longer the dominant desktop/workstation OS.

  • Schizo (Score:4, Funny)

    by ProsperoDGC ( 569875 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:28PM (#12536139) Homepage
    Before Sun and Microsoft start evangelizing an identity management scheme to the rest of us, perhaps they need to sort out their own schizophrenia.

    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.

    • Before Sun and Microsoft start evangelizing an identity management scheme to the rest of us, perhaps they need to sort out their own schizophrenia.

      Is that why their announcement is incoherent?

      I read the announcement and I read the PDF and I have to say that I know about as much as I did before I started. Can someone decode the acronyms and trademarks and explain just what this Last Great Single Sign On is really about?
  • Does anyone else think Ballmer looks like Shrek in that photo, minus the green?

  • Cooperation or desperation (Score:5, Informative)

    by breakbeatninja ( 846922 ) <envescent.gmail@com> on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:33PM (#12536169) Homepage Journal
    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= [yahoo.com] 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.

    • you know better than any of us that Microsoft is a difficult company to deal with

      Yes they do. Think about it: Sun forced Microsoft to settle for $2 billion regarding Java. Sun is backing OO.org without anyone having sued them. Sun is open sourcing UNIX(TM) this summer.

      Sun's lawyers and executives have balls. Even the female ones.

      If anything will make Sun succeed it is this ability to deal with the Microsofts and IBMs and survive.

    • They first shook hands when they both had their hands up Darl McBride's ass so they could move Darl's lips.

      Using McBride as a mouthpiece is an act of desparation. They were both doing this at the same time.

  • After watching 5 minutes of the video and seeing Balmer market, I couldn't watch anymore.

    Get to the point, asshole !

  • Wait (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's a trick. Get an axe.
  • When I read news that these two companies are working together so that their respective office suites can seamlessly open each others documents, then I will be suitably impressed.

    All this "sign-on" and "identity management" thing is all well and good, but IMHO the home user will benefit more immediately and palpably with interoperability between suites/programs. Maybe Microsoft will actually become "standards compliant" soon....

  • I thought Passport was dead (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nova Express ( 100383 ) <lawrenceperson.gmail@com> on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:36PM (#12536202) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Is it just me, or does "a single sign-on and identity management solution" sound an awful lot like Passport?

      "Microsoft pens ID software"> [theinquirer.net] "SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft is building software it says will manage personal data and provide more secure identification in future versions of Windows. Under the cunning plan, the operating system will have ID technology called "info-cards" which are designed to allow users to shop and access services online. However, the technology appears to be similar to Pas

    • It is exactly *not* like passport. In fact, the whole passport disaster is often referred to as a lesson learned.

      Here is the latest philosophical trend in Identity, and the founding principles for the SSO and IdM movement of the moment:

      The Laws of Identity [identityblog.com]

      If you read this, you will see that certain of the digerati are working very hard, even within Microsoft itself, to ensure that future identity systems are exactly the opposite of 'distrusted and irrelevant'....

      Pixie

  • A Smith said (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SteveAstro ( 209000 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:43PM (#12536249)
    People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is im-possible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and jus-tice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. Adam Smith, the "Wealth of Nations" What goes around comes around. Steve

  • In bed with the devil (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hotspotbloc ( 767418 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:46PM (#12536281) Homepage Journal
    Next year when MS starts screwing Sun, Sun will complain and be told: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." [nyud.net]

  • Don't bother watching (Score:3, Funny)

    by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:47PM (#12536285)
    Steve doesn't do the Monkey dance.

  • Similar Reactions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by buckhead_buddy ( 186384 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:52PM (#12536320)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by astrashe ( 7452 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @02:08PM (#12536807) Journal
      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.

  • Unified Java? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nostriluu ( 138310 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @12:54PM (#12536341) Homepage
    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.

    • All that would be needed for that would be for MS to ship a real JRE rather than their own borken one. IIRC sun's pretty happy to let big corps redistribute their JRE for free provided you keep the license as it is. What I see coming out of this is putting Java into .net. Maybe even merging the two, but certainly having a way to compile Java into .net CLR, and maybe a port of the class libraries which is, after all, the really hard part of writing a java implementation.
  • I notice from one of the PDFs:
    Microsoft and Sun (collectively, the "Co-Developers") each agree to grant you a license, under royalty-free and otherwise reasonable, non-discriminatory terms and conditions, to their respective essential patent claims that are necessary to implement the Specification.

    If it really is free, as the above suggests, this could be a nice component of single signon. (I haven't read all of it - yet)

  • However Microsoft's site does not mention it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:00PM (#12536397)
    .........at least not in their homepage

  • Here's a thought... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:00PM (#12536398) Journal
    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.

    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 /.-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?

    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.
    • 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.

      I don't suppose you would consider IBM to be a very big vendor that already knows how to make enterprise class software? One that has already made substantial enterprise-level contributions to the Linux code base?
      • Yes, I do consider IBM to be a big vendor, who is making contributions, and knows how to do so. I didn't mention them ... wasn't thorough enough. I think that all big vendors working with an ally that can't necessarily be easily bought out or run out of business will be how they take back market share from Microsoft.

        My prediction is small enterprise inroads while trying to solidify a home/SMB user base. In the background, I think we will see Microsoft opponents working to establish F/OSS (supported by big

  • New version of Windows based on Solaris announced. (Score:4, Funny)

    by aphor ( 99965 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:01PM (#12536401) Journal

    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] [wikipedia.org] 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."

  • This makes sense.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:14PM (#12536482) Journal
    I know that most folks are familiar with the Linux vs. Windows debate but look who could get replaced easier....Solaris.

    A case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Maybe......
    • That saying is bullshit anyway. The only thing you do know is that the friend of your enemy is your enemy. Every company that makes deals with Microsoft tends to get screwed over one way or another. Therefore Sun is clearly circling the toilet bowl. Vaguely around the same time, the UltraSPARC processor's performance was eclipsed by, well, just about everybody, Linux became popular, and IBM began to have the fastest processors around. Meanwhile Windows continued to gain market share against all Unixes over

  • Revenge of the Sith (Score:3, Insightful)

    by obender ( 546976 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:23PM (#12536536)
    I have to give it to Lucas, I would have never guessed McNealy is Darth Vader.

    Oh hold on, this is not coming from the Cannes festival...

  • Liberty ID-FF and WS-* (Score:3, Informative)

    by Broadcatch ( 100226 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:29PM (#12536575) Homepage
    It's hard to find much on the technology, but some info is here [sun.com]. Liberty continues to be a win mainly for the corporate IP lawyers as they work to find ways to share customer information between the fortune 500. Meanwhile, most of the WS-* stack is not in any standards committee, and thus not availble to free and open source projects. I think the identity system that actually catches on will be 100% FOSS - probably based on SAML 2.0 - and spring from the grassroots, rather than from some corporate entities that would like to be our "identity providers."

  • Won't somebody think of the kids?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by ogonek ( 833611 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:30PM (#12536579)

    [T]he Sun home page has a picture of McNealy and Ballmer smiling together.
    More like baring their teeth together. Seriously, I wouldn't want to have any small child see those two together like that; it's just plain scary. And that is before you start thinking about the sentence with both Microsoft, Sun and "identity management solution".

  • A. Ballmer and McNealy (Score:4, Funny)

    by fstanchina ( 564024 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:33PM (#12536603) Homepage
    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.

  • Get with it! (Score:5, Informative)

    by sillypixie ( 696077 ) * on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:44PM (#12536680) Journal
    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 [sun.com] from the MS-Sun announcement.

    Check out the WS-* White Paper [ibm.com]

    Check out Microsoft's Vision For an Identity Metasystem [microsoft.com]

    Check out the Liberty Alliance Technology Review [projectliberty.org]

    And if prefer blogs to White Papers, check out Kim Cameron's Blog [identityblog.com]. That's really the happening place in Identity Management right now...

    Pixie
    • This is nothing more than the industry's largest monopolies attempting to keep control.

      Go ahead, support your favorite monopoly. Trust them. They always do what's best for the people. Because they love you.
    • 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.

      Yeah, because it's so convenient if my on-line book store, my on-line porn site, and my work-related on-line services can exchange information about me with each other, right?

      Dream on. People are not going to trust anybody, least of all Microsoft or Sun, to provide secure and private identity management via back-end servers. If companies are going to try to force peop
  • At least Beavis & Butthead were entertaining. :P

  • Oh my... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by flajann ( 658201 )
    What strange bedfellows. The single-signon technology quite frankly scares me. There is much potential for abuse. If someone steals your account, they'll have total access to *all* of your online services accessible through that account.

    Besides, browsers such as Mozilla already have the capability of storing your login info -- LOCALLY, UNDER YOUR CONTROL, not at some distant and super major coropration.

    Well, the choice is yours, folks. Centralized login, and all that implies, or decentralized and less vu

    • ... browsers such as Mozilla already have the capability of storing your login info -- LOCALLY, UNDER YOUR CONTROL, not at some distant and super major coropration.

      Browsers such as Mozilla can store cookies, that's all they do. Or maybe some other kind of local state mechanism, but none of these, all by themselves, are a dagburn bit of good if you want to authenticate against common directory servers, which are widely used to store user information and credentials. Common directory servers such as Mic

      • No, browsers do have password-management schemes. I use Firefox's all the time ... it recognizes the particular site that is requesting authorization and fills in my account and password for me. Works well, and is about as far as I would like to go in terms of automated authentication. This focus on "single signon" is a smokescreen for "centralized transaction control and monitoring" and I want none of it. A better system would be one that has a hardware authentication token that the user jacks into his USB

  • In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jav1231 ( 539129 ) on Sunday May 15, 2005 @01:56PM (#12536753)
    In other news, McNeally and Ballmer have also been trying to figure out a way to make Hell hotter and are currently developing STH technology: a way to make people's first mistake send them straight to Hell. Evil never sleeps, folks!
  • I wouldn't be smiling either if the guy next to me picked $2B out of my pocket. :0)

  • microsofts new pawn (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SolusSD ( 680489 )
    Sun is microsoft's new pawn in the server market. Microsoft's excuse not be be labeled a monopoly if/when they become a bigger force in the server market. By keeping Sun alive, microsoft will have a controlled competitor in the market. Exactly what microsoft turned apple into years ago by buying nonvoting stock in apple. does anyone else see this?
  • Microsoft is notorious for standards incompatibility from OS to IE to Office Doc Formats. This announcement is about interoperability thru standards support in the Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture. I believe that the WS standards are the key to the next level of integration with IT. This not only translates to lower cost of development and ownership of codebases but also begins to provide the next evolution of identity management, a pink elephant in service application industry.
  • McNealy said that Gates and Ballmer looked like Beavis and Butthead? Take a look at that picture of McNealy and Ballmer on Sun's site, that looks more like Beavis and Butthead to me.

    Damn, I just looked again and McNealy seriously could play a 50 year old Butthead, what with that raised upper lip and all. Just picture it [cell2000.net].

  • So what's Microsoft's motivation here? The buzzards are circling Sun now and they're no longer a serious threat. My guess is that Microsoft wants an ally that can slow adoption of Open Source Software. McNealy's comment about Windows and Solaris being the 2 top OS's and not knowing what the third will be shows an obvious dislike of Linux. But more importantly, since Sun does the majority of development on StarOffice, which becomes OpenOffice, Microsoft wants to put a stop to it because it has the potent

  • signs of the times (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sloanster ( 213766 ) <ringfan@@@mainphrame...com> on Sunday May 15, 2005 @07:04PM (#12538715) Journal
    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.

Slashdot Top Deals

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Close