Sun desperate?

The New York Times reports that

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, and his counterpart and onetime archenemy at Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, took the stage in a hotel conference room [in Palo Alto on May 14] to report on their efforts to make their software programs communicate. The collaboration was announced a year ago in the wake of the landmark settlement to Sun's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. …

The alliance has been developed in the last year by teams led by Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chief software architect, and Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's chief technology officer. The first step is a specification called Web Single Sign-On, creating interconnecting systems for establishing security privileges, known as authentication. The instructions are available now for software developers and will begin to appear in products later this year.

Next month the companies will begin a more ambitious joint effort aimed at letting programmers write software that communicates between the .Net programming environment from Microsoft and the Java software environment of Sun.

That the companies have a genuine commitment to the idea was underscored by the fact that Microsoft will be a major sponsor this year at Sun's annual JavaOne conference for software developers.

Sun is desperate to survive. Why is Microsoft interested in helping it? Sun does have a major part of the server market—which Microsoft has long coveted. Perhaps this is Microsoft's way of worming its way in. I'm surprised by their subtlety, but I guess even the devil can speak sweetly when the situation calls for it.