When I first read about the agreement between Sun and Microsoft, I had two visceral responses:

• Wow. Sun’s Scott McNeally has never had a nice thing to say about Bill Gates or Microsoft. So…wow.
• Linux

The former is pretty obvious (as in, strange).

The latter explains away the former – it’s all business, and the business here is to unite and conquer against a common enemy: Linux.

Face it – Sun has been struggling for the last few years. Formerly the leader in Unix systems with it’s Sparc chip/Solaris OS, it’s margins have been hit the dot bomb, lower-cost alternatives (such as Intel/Linux) and miscues with Java (i.e., they still haven’t figured out how to really cash in on this language).

Microsoft – with $40B+ in its coffers, has been struggling lately, as well: No, they are not hurting per se, but they see the long-term writing on the wall: The release of Yukon, Whitby and Longhorn keep slipping, anti-trust issues dog them domestically and abroad, and security issues haunt them. In other words, it’s going to take some work to keep this company competitive long term.

Linux is a big enemy of MS, as well: Linux has a reputation of being more stable, less expensive and more extensible (no vendor lock-in) than MS server products.

So – in this respect alone, the MS/Sun truce makes sense.

Let the games begin…