The companies gave an update Wednesday to their "ongoing dialogue" about product interoperability that stemmed from a far-ranging partnership announced in April.
With payments of US$1.95 billion to Sun and the onstage reconciliation between Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer -- bitter rivals for many years -- expectations for the landmark, 10-year agreement are high.
But in sharp contrast to the hoopla that surrounded the announcement of the deal, the companies' first progress report was tempered and tactical. Executives offered few details on future product plans beyond early next year.
That deliberate caution points to the challenges the companies face in making their partnership successful. Sun and Microsoft will still compete in key areas, such as server software and development tools. And though they're committed to a long-term partnership to iron out differences where it makes mutual sense, they still have thorny technical and business obstacles in their way.
"The real question is: Will they give each other each enough space where they can collaborate such that it's good for customers and both companies can make money?" said Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer at software company Mercury, which works with both Microsoft and Sun. "That's a hard thing to figure out, especially considering that they hated each other."
Microsoft and Sun said they are intentionally being conservative in setting expectations. Company executives noted some areas of potential interoperability beyond network authorization, Web services specifications and product certification, but they steered clear of grandiose claims or ambitious product plans.
"When we do have something to announce, it's going to be looked at with a lot of interest," said Andrew Layman, director of distributed systems/interoperability at Microsoft. "We want to make sure it lives up to expectations."
The companies' procedures for working together -- which include scheduled executive conferences and monthly meetings between 24 engineers -- are more significant than any actual product development, argued Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's chief technology officer.
"The issue here has fundamentally been around trust," he said.
Under scrutiny
Still, the companies' commitment to product interoperability is being closely watched. It represents US$350 million of the US$1.95 billion 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.
Looking ahead
Sun and Microsoft made mention of some of the potential areas of future common work, including creating better interoperability between Microsoft's management products stemming from its Dynamic Systems Initiative and Sun's own data center management software, called N1.
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