Microsoft and Sun's difficult dance

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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."

The toughest challenge is for them to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time.

--Michael Cherry, analyst, Directions on Microsoft

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.

"DSI and N1 are sort of in the same stages of their lives," Papadopoulos said. "We have an opportunity to influence each other."

Papadopoulos, who has met several times with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, said the two companies are doing more than simply supporting or directing the development of industry standards.

"I wouldn't be involved at this level, and Gates wouldn't be involved at this level, if we thought these were just standards activities. There is real tangible stuff that our customers have told us to solve," he said.

Going beyond supporting existing standards and working on product interoperability could set Sun and Microsoft apart in the eyes of customers. For example, in the area of systems management, standards allow two separate products to talk to each other, but they generally don't enable one vendor's product to administer a mixed network of gear from Sun, Microsoft and others.

"When you can manage through one common tool and set up group policies for Sun users from Microsoft Active Directory, then you don't have to cross-train managers on administration tools," said Kerry Gerontianos, president of Incremax Technologies, which develops custom Microsoft applications. "That higher level of interoperability means real savings."

On the software development front, the two companies have not committed to any closer interoperability between Microsoft's .Net development tools for Windows and Sun's Java line of tools and server software--something company observers had originally expected. The only work thus far that relates to software development is a commitment to work together on Web services standards proposals, Papadopoulos said.

Indeed, both companies' respective development tools and middleware "stacks" will likely continue to be their main point of competition. That infrastructure software is typically very expensive and critical to sales