The man who called Microsoft (justifiably) 'unrepentant monopolists' has just gone public to declare them - "people we can do business with".

Can't help thinking that Sun's woes have blighted their judgement !!!

[link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44749-2004Apr2.html|http://www.washingto...749-2004Apr2.html]

Doug M

#2 above link seems to *now* require membership (I can't remem our joint id). It was accessible when I 1st went to it but just now asked for membership. The WP item is good because it was reader feedback.

So, have added the below link in the hope they don't pull same stunt (just checked again, hmm seems they will, so have added the whole item here)

[link|http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,608663,00.html|http://www.fortune.c...04,608663,00.html]

FULL EXTRACT<<
DAVID KIRKPATRICK
Behind Microsoft\ufffds Settlement with Sun? The Power of the Open-Source Movement
What matters now is not where a technology comes from but how it works with everything else.
FORTUNE
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
By David Kirkpatrick


Once the shock of seeing Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy happily together on the same stage had passed, the world of tech punditry last Friday turned to the question, What does Microsoft\ufffds settlement with Sun mean?

Though many aspects of the deal remain murky, let\ufffds speculate anyway. Driving the peace settlement, it seems to me, is an awareness that we are all moving from a world of centralized proprietary technologies into one of distributed power in computing. Sun and Microsoft are nervously seeking to position themselves for the new reality, with which they are both profoundly uncomfortable.

The technology industry is starting to mirror the Internet on which it thrives and functions\ufffdit is more and more distributed, global, and centerless. The most obvious example of how technology, innovation, and business power are becoming distributed is the open-source software movement. Open source\ufffds influence is far greater than its current market share in software might suggest. The open-source model increasingly defines what\ufffds possible in technology. What matters now is not where a technology comes from but how it works with everything else. Open-source software can be made to play well with others more readily than any technology we\ufffdve ever seen. Even more than its low price, that\ufffds why companies like it so much\ufffdthey can modify its guts to their specific requirements.

So what are Sun and Microsoft doing? Despite their longstanding differences, both companies come from the same older world of proprietary technology and centralized control. They just represent different wings of the same movement.

It benefits them both to put their differences behind them for several reasons. For one thing, as executives said in interviews, customers want things to work together. One might also read that as: customers want our stuff to be more like open source. In any case, it behooves Sun and Microsoft to at least make it easier for people to use their respective software in tandem. That much interoperability they can offer by working together.

And it also benefits both companies to stop wasting their energies focusing so much animosity on one another when they really need to be figuring out how to deal with the much larger issue\ufffdopen source and distributed technology generally. Microsoft and Sun are really uniting against a common enemy. This is how one should read the interesting quote in Monday\ufffds Wall Street Journal from Microsoft executive Hank Vigil, who says that working together is "beneficial to both of us relative to other choices."

Contrast the Sun/Microsoft rapprochement with the tech industry\ufffds other big news event last week\ufffdIBM\ufffds announcement that it would expand the pool of partners for its Power microprocessor architecture. IBM embraces the new world of distributed technology resources and expertise, and seeks to profit by encouraging it. By putting its marketing and financial might behind the Linux operating system, IBM legitimized that product and the open source approach it represented. That made big companies willing to risk putting Linux into their critical infrastructure. And it gave a big push to the forces that have now put Sun and Microsoft on the defensive.

It seems to me that IBM now aims to do to Intel what it has already done to Microsoft and Sun. It wants to use the distributed resources of the industry to help it turn its Power microprocessor into an industry standard. The line is a performance champ that is increasingly used in devices all the way from handheld products and game machines (it powers current or future products from all three major game makers) up to large supercomputers and eventually even, executives promised, mainframes. It\ufffds a breadth that mirrors what\ufffds possible with the Linux software that runs so well on Power.

Now IBM will create a variety of new resources and processes to let more people use Power in more ways, even as it maintains control of the core of the chip. The company will allow essentially anyone who wants access to a state-of-the-art microprocessor to tinker with the hardware and software in order to build the exact kind of computer they need. It will broaden and make more widely available the development tools to tailor Power to specific devices, and also is expanding the number of manufacturing partners that can build the resulting chips.

Intel, a company that generally still operates the old way\ufffdcentralized innovation and control\ufffdmay not be threatened by this. And IBM executives deny any anti-Intel agenda. But there are huge growth opportunities in microprocessors as more and more devices acquire intelligence. IBM may vastly expand its market presence even as it empowers many disparate smaller companies and partners all over the world who will now be able to use Power chips.

IBM set itself on this path when it bit the bullet a few years ago and decided it was willing to cannibalize its own software businesses by embracing Linux. The process was not without pain inside IBM, but it has fundamentally repositioned the company and reset its culture so that it can come up with innovative extensions to the approach, such as the one last week.

Sun, too, has finally embraced Linux, especially for smaller computers, including desktops. But Sun, unlike IBM, has been unwilling to endorse the idea that Linux could replace its own operating system for the most important computing tasks. It wants its Solaris software to always be seen as more ironclad than Linux. IBM gave up that approach with its competing AIX operating system.

Microsoft is even further behind in all of this. While it has taken a few steps to open up, Bill Gates and company find the entire open-source movement financially repugnant. In the end the company might benefit if it were willing to open the code to Windows and thus tap into the distributed resources of the globalized industry to strengthen the product. Yet that could result in a tremendous hit to earnings. It\ufffds possible that Microsoft could continue to thrive and even dominate based on the power of its brand. But I don\ufffdt think Microsoft is prepared to take the kind of risks that IBM did. After all, there is more to lose.

In the long run, however, the forces of decentralization are much more powerful than any company. Sun, Microsoft, and their ilk can resist the inevitable, as they continued to do last week. But change is happening\ufffdand they no longer control it.

<<


#3 Found another link that covers the Java user community reactions
[link|http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3336061|http://www.internetn...ticle.php/3336061]