The end of adolescence...
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Sun and Microsoft's uneasy truce.
Some things in life - death, taxes, software bugs - are certain. But things in the IT industry suddenly seem a lot less certain than they have been.
At one level, bitter enemies are acting like long-lost friends. As unusual spectacles go, the sight of Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, embracing Steve Ballmer, his opposite number at Microsoft, in April, will take some beating (see this month's cover story, 'Uneasy truce'). The insults they traded for the best part of a decade may often have been delivered with tongue in cheek, but at times there appeared to be genuine enmity between them. Now, it seems all is forgiven and forgotten.
Why? As our article points out, there are many answers. But ask McNealy, and he says that customers are the main, and perhaps even the only, reason: "Just about every customer I meet says, 'Cut the rhetoric, Scott. Go get interoperable. We need you to just stop the noise and start the collaboration'."
The personalities are changing in another way. In the last two months, some of the industry's luminaries have taken a back seat: Tom Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems; Michael Dell; Sanjay Kumar, CEO of Computer Associates; Joe Forehand, CEO of Accenture; Solomon Trujillo, CEO of Orange; and Ron Zambonini, boss of Cognos. Even McNealy has agreed to share power by handing the president's position at Sun to the 38-year-old Jonathan Schwartz.
The timing of so many resignations signals the arrival of the industry's next generation. If the unlikely partnership of Sun and Microsoft is anything to go by, this generation promises to be a little more mature than its rather callow predecessor.
That is something to applaud. When Information Age recently met with one of IBM's top executives, Joe Damassa, the man responsible for WebSphere's global marketing, he became highly animated when making the point that CIOs want to talk about business solutions these days, rather than hearing about technology. And they certainly don't want the headlines to be about how the industry's veterans are lobbying vitriol at each other.
Perhaps the IT industry is coming to realise that it has to grow up as fast as IT's role is maturing within business.
