Former bitter rivals Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. Friday said they were nearly ready to release products that help bridge the gap between their operating systems, a result of their legal settlement more than a year ago. (MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)
Microsoft, the world's largest software company and Sun, a maker of network computers, servers and software, in April 2004 agreed to settle a years-long battle, with Microsoft paying $2 billion to Sun to resolve the dispute in a 10-year technical collaboration agreement. Sun had charged Microsoft with anti-competitive behavior.
The two companies announced new plans that would allow a Web-based single sign-on between systems that use both Microsoft and Sun software, potentially eliminating the need for multiple user names and passwords for different computer systems and software programs.
"These are huge messages to our employees and to our customers that we're working together," Sun Chief Executive Officer Scott McNealy said in a joint news conference with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Palo Alto, California.
Microsoft and Sun will ultimately submit the new specifications to a standards organization for finalization and for ratification as industry standards.
Ballmer and McNealy also said the two are working together on systems management software that will allow interoperability between their operating systems and management software.
As part of that effort, the firms are collaborating on the development of WS-Management, a Web services specification co-authored by Microsoft, Intel Corp. and other companies that defines a single protocol to meet systems management requirements spanning different types of hardware, operating systems and applications.
"We've been hard at work, the two companies, for a year," said Ballmer. "We're poised to leave the computer lab now and enter the marketplace."
