SUN & MICROSOFT
On Friday Sun & Microsoft buried the axe by agreeing to a 10 year deal that will get the two companies to work together to have their platforms interoperate. Scott McNealy & Steve Ballmer claim that this deal was driven by customer needs... I claim they are telling a half truth.

For the first time in a long time Sun & Microsoft's interests are aligned... they have a mutual enemy, and that enemy is Open Source. Both firms are struggling to come up with a great strategy to deal with Open source and I view this agreement as part of their response to open source. By getting their platforms to interoperate the two firms have built a positive externalities into their products, and assuming that they really work together to make these platforms work better together, you can be sure they won't make it easy for linux to interoperate.