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Sun and Microsoft: True love or a marriage of convenience?

Martin LaMonica CNET News

Published: 03 Dec 2004 13:50 GMT

Under scrutiny
Still, the companies' commitment to product interoperability is being closely watched. It represents $350m of the $1.95bn deal, which also settled litigation and established that neither company would sue the other on the basis of patents.

Because the legal settlement was such a large portion of the arrangement, it remains unclear how significant the product interoperability portion of the deal really is, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft.

If Microsoft and Sun end up focusing on making existing protocols work together, rather than on developing future products, the joint work will have a smaller impact on both companies' customers, he said.

"The toughest challenge is for them to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time," Cherry said. "What happens with these agreements is that they get made, the clock keeps ticking, the technology changes and, over time, things get irrelevant."

Thus far, Microsoft and Sun have mainly talked about making their existing products work better together, rather than about collaborating on products under development, Cherry said.

For example, rather than use older protocols, Microsoft could make its future Web services communications system, called Indigo, the protocol of choice when exchanging information between programs running on Solaris and Windows machines. Similarly, making Microsoft's file system WinFS run on Solaris would greatly improve search in corporate networks, he said.