Microsoft, Sun Update Their Technical Cooperation Work - ' Focusing on End Users ' (
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Among the focused areas of delivery is to end users, who want their applications to run on .Net and Sun Java systems, he said, while IT managers want to be able to log into one console.
For their part, developers want to run applications that live in both the Java and .Net worlds, and they want to be able to stitch them together in various ways, he said.
"So, we have challenged a wide variety of customer scenarios. The demo we are going to show of the work we have done and the results achieved may be the most boring demo youve ever seen, but thats what users want," Ballmer quipped.
The two companies have also cooperated on the management and the standards front to create technology that lets users run Sun and Microsoft software from a single management console.
"We have been hard at work for the past 12 months and these are the results, which I think are pretty impressive," Ballmer said.
The storage market is also booming, and Suns recent purchase of Tarantella helped further facilitate the interoperability between the Sun and Microsoft components, he said.
Read more here about Suns purchase of Tarantella.
But there is still a lot more to do in light of a long list of needs from customers, so "we will be hard at work for the next 12 months as well," he said.
Microsofts .Net and Suns Java are the two leading platforms, and "giving the world the interoperability it wants" means requiring them to work together, he said.
Giving his comments, McNealy joked that Ballmer could now end his sentences for him, "which is why he got to present first," he said.
But he acknowledged that the work has been tough and it has only really come together nicely over the last three months or so.
"What we have achieved and what we plan going forward is quite impressive," he said.
Microsoft is now also a major sponsor of next months Java One conference, and they are now also demonstrating how the products work together.
"Who would have thunk this would ever have happened," he asked the laughing audience.
Next Page: A joint advisory committee.
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