These things are really hard to figure out, but I think it's MS reacting to the EU hammer that got dropped on them. Despite what Balmer says, that stung, and is a big cloud hanging over them. It's a big win for Sun, who is clinging by their fingernails. I don't believe for even a second that MS did this for their customers to improve interoperability - that's BS.
Don't know about the "real deal" but my guess is that they got tired of spending big cash on lawyers, Sun liked the idea of 2 billion $, MS finally realized they couldn't ignore Java to death, MS realizes it isn't going to win every lawsuit, and Sun figures it has a lot to gain working with MS,
I would agree with you 100% if the EU thing hadn't happened. MS is under tremendous scrutiny and pressure to avoid the appearance of monopolistic behavior. $2B buys a lot of lawyers, they could have litigated this thing to death for a lot less than that if they wanted to. The press release that Sun issued was chock full of words like "cooperation", "customer choice" and "technical collaboration", which makes me wonder if Sun has become MS's lap dog to help cast them in a new light of industry cooperation. http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2004-04/sunflash.20040402.3.html The terms of the deal are huge - including forgiveness of all past IP claims. There has to be more to the deal than just the Java squabble for MS to make such a far reaching concession.
The big picture goes well beyond Java, but that is pretty much the starting point. I work for one of the largest software vendors (platform independent) however this has huge impacts. Not just b/c we had to build a new version of our software to support the Sun JVM. It is not just b/c of the Java Virtual Machine you are running with your browser (the thing that lets complex software run through a browser). If MS had a lock on that, then the authentication piece they can also put the screws to competition. Authentication is so huge for enterprise systems that effectively SUN stood to lose huge in the enterprises for backend or middleware software markets. Basically, if MS could lock down all browser to server communication protocol; the only thing left would be Wintel based machines in a few years. The EU/US may have prolonged the inevitable, but they effectively settled b/c no one wants to believe we let Bill Gates take over the ENTIRE world. We are just not ready to concede that, and MS knew they could not win with that perception pervading.
One thing that occurs to me is that MS could have bought Sun outright for just about $2B. If you study the EU case, the primary complaintants were Real Networks and Sun. One of the remedies that the EU specified was to force MS to make their IP available to competitors to improve interoperability - this move undermines the EU case tremendously.
