Sun Microsystems announced it has filed a private antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation. The suit, filed March 8, 2002 in the United States District Court in San Jose, CA., seeks remedies for the harm inflicted by Microsoft’s anticompetitive behavior with respect to the Java platform and for damages resulting from Microsoft’s illegal efforts to maintain and expand its monopoly power. In June 2001, the Federal Court of Appeals found Microsoft guilty of illegally abusing its monopoly power with respect to Sun and the Java platform. Sun’s suit seeks to redress the competitive and economic harm caused by Microsoft’s illegal acts. Read more on ZDNews.
Sun Files Suit Against Microsoft for Anti-Trust Violations
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Eugenia Loli
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This is great news.
Microsoft is finally being seen for the behemoth it really is, and slowly, bit by bit, all the victims who have been hurt by their actions are fighting back.
I wonder (and speculate) if this has anything to do with the Be Inc. suit filed recently.
-Chris Simmons,
Avid BeOS User.
[email protected]
The government proposed sanctions, if you’d call them that, will accomplish nothing. MS can break the law and reap a nice profit. However, justified litigation such as the Be and AOL suits are likely to make the MS way of business too expensive for even MS. I think we’ll see a lot more of these, and i’ll smile each time. Go Sun!
Knowing Bill Gates, he’ll just take all these lawsuits as a bigger challenge to his intellect and superiority. If that’s the case, watch out!
Before pro-MS fans bash me, a little disclaimer. I base this on books I’ve read about him, not any first-hand knowlege of him personally. From what I’ve read, Gates has some sort of uncontrolable need to prove his superiority.
Cool!!
“not any first-hand knowlege of him personally” how can you don’t have first-hand knowlege of the man, everybody do
. I know him better than most of my uncle.
This case and the Be case are lot stronger than what was Netscape (not that Netscape case was weak either).
Whether you are in favor of MS or against them, you can’t argue the fact that it sucks to be MS right now
Seems like everybody in their grandma is trying to pick their pockets.
Won’t be long until their competitors sue them right off the planet, and Linux pundets are drooling.
I don’t agree with this lawsuit. I believe that Sun is just crying because they are beginning to realize that Java will never be what they hoped it would be. Besides, Java is available for Windows XP, it just doesn’t install as part of the base system.
I also feel that MS has the right not to include Java software in their operating systems.
I figure it probably has to do with the DOJ throwing in the towel and Microsoft wont get punished as severely as everyone had hoped. So more than likely the good ole boy system probably sent a red flag to Sun and probably even AOL (Be was a shoe in of course) to say “hey you better start getting ready for court and open a lawsuit, because the DOJ will not win this one!” I imagine that being Microsoft is very big and powerful, it will take AOL, Be and Sun to fight this battle and maybe finally get their just desserts?! I still don’t want to see MS split in 2, because then we would have 2 bullies instead of one… 1 to run by Bill Gates and the other by Steve Ballmer!! I also don’t see no wrong in bundled software, as long as they don’t locked into the operating system by default!!!
and so it starts to BURN!!!!
“In addition, the suit seeks preliminary injunctions to require Microsoft to ship Java with Windows XP and Internet Explorer.” … from ZDnews
I don’t see how they could enforce MS to ship Java with XP, but I do agree that IE should be Java compliant, because it is just as bad for non-Windows users to have to suffer on the internet due to IE specific websites using J++ and/or J Script! IE is not standard, regardless of what some folks want you to believe!!!
What exactly does Sun hope to achieve by this lawsuit? MS is busy expanding their domain of influence -fancy Xbox and all the other things they are doing. On the other hand, IBM, as we heared this morning, has has just overtaken Sun in the Unix Server market. Was that an MS fault too? Neither Sun’s hardware nor OS business is growing. They can’t even maintain their current market share! If they don’t get back to work quickily, they will be dead in a few years, MS or no MS.
>>Neither Sun’s hardware nor OS business is growing. They can’t even maintain their current market share! If they don’t get back to work quickily, they will be dead in a few years, MS or no MS.<<
Sun needs to take the consumer market more seriously. They already build great hardware and software, why not expand it into the consumer world and compete head on?!
Apple should be next, as well as Intel. I wonder if these companies are really expecting to receive cash, or if they just want to criple M$ as much as possible. In my opionion, the more that sue the better.
In general, it’s funny too that most of the pro-ms people I know are starting to lose faith in M$, whether it’s product activation or their costantly changing standards (visual studio to .NET)
…. I can’t possibly see Apple using M$ at all. If you know about the history between the two companies you will see that M$ invested $30m back 5 years ago to promote business for them, that was in 97 I believe that was around the time M$ started really developing Office for Mac OS.
But hey I run an OS X box here and I’m glad to see M$ taking the long awaited pounding it needs, M$ has taken so much from the computer community, and then M$ thinks it can just pop out some nice Eye Candy and keep everyone happy.
All I can say is that for me OS X opened my eyes and made me realize that M$ doesn’t have s***!
Geez, with all these problems, it’s now inevitable that Balmer will have Microsoft stop selling Windows. What will the world do! My god I wish the sky wasn’t falling, chicken little!
MS has enough dough to keep these cases in the courts for a very long time. And even more money left over to purchase a nice island in the south pacific for each judge and prosecuting attorney they come up against. I just saw a news story that claimed Bill’s net worth to be 53 billion.
I’m expecting a lot of, “oh, that case? They settled out of court. The plaintiff? Hell, they all retired early and are living like kings in Patagonia.”
>>If you know about the history between the two companies you will see that M$ invested $30m back 5 years ago to promote business for them, that was in 97 I believe that was around the time M$ started really developing Office for Mac OS.<<
Well actually it was $150 Million, and Microsoft (from what I gather) has already sold all the shares, so now they are just an Alliance. As for Microsoft Office, (at least Word and Excel) has been available to the Mac since the late 80s. I own a Mac SE-30 with Word and Excel installed running Mac OS ‘System 7’ with 650 KB of RAM and a single floppy drive. It still works perfect and is hard to crash 🙂
Some people have this myth that Microsoft just started making software for the Mac, of course I am not saying you (|jBett|) assumes that 🙂
–start quote–
On the other hand, IBM, as we heared this morning, has has just overtaken Sun in the Unix Server market.
–end quote–
Could you tell me where you read this information? I’m interested to know more about this.
>>Bill’s net worth to be 53 billion.<<
He lost 10 Billion from last year… OUCH!!!
Steve Jobs has just joined the Billionare Club with worth just about over 1 Billion dollars (according to Forbes Magazine).
> Sun needs to take the consumer
> market more seriously. They
> already build great hardware
> and software, why not expand
> it into the consumer world
> and compete head on?!
Exactly! Beats the hell out of me why they are stuck on doing the same thing. MS is doing Windows, and Office, and WinCE, and SQL, and now Xbox, and God knows what next.
Meanwhile, ‘most everybody else is bent on doing the same thing they’ve been doing for 1000 years. McNealy and the man at Oracle are still telling the some old anti-MS jokes, and gradually specialising their respective companies into oblivion.
If MS can encroach on Solaris’ Turf, why can’t Sun write a decent desktop OS, say? Or Office Suite? MS business practices sucks big-time, but companies like Sun need to get balls!
>>–start quote–
>>On the other hand, IBM, as
>>we heared this morning, has has just overtaken Sun in the >>Unix Server market.
>>–end quote–
>Could you tell me where you read
>this information? I’m interested
>to know more about this.
See the news at CNET:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-855404.html
Nobody is preventing Sun from releasing their own crappy VM. Sun, stop hiring lawyers and fix your crappy Java platform!
The future of silicon valley is bleak. Soon there will be more lawyers than engineers.
$53 Billion is nothing, when you consider he used to be worth almost twice that.
Also, Microsoft was one of the first companies to make Macintosh software. Just go through your library’s Byte or Macworld magazines. Bill Gate’s and Microsoft have a very heavy presence from the very beginning.
>>>>$53 Billion is nothing, when you consider he used to be worth almost twice that.
Part of that “loss” happened because Gates contributed over $20+ Billion to charity. If he didn’t give away that money, he would be worthed close to $80 Billion.
>>Part of that “loss” happened because Gates contributed over $20+ Billion to charity.<<
It’ called a tax write off 🙂
Microsft’s Bill Gates looks back at the crowd and shouts… “I AM THE LAW!!!” before being taken into custody and thrown into the slammer.
I just thought that one up he he 🙂
>>Microsft’s<<
I type too fast (or I’m an idiot:-)
I meant to say Microsoft’s Bill Gates…
>>>It’ called a tax write off 🙂
Quote from the newspaper, Seattle Post-Intelligencer at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/africa/billqa23.shtml
“Bill Gates’ foundation has both, Kramer said, an approach sometimes called “venture” or “entrepreneurial” philanthropy. But Gates has gone beyond this, Kramer said, by actively participating in decisions on grants and playing an advocacy role in global health issues.
This, Kramer said, significantly reduces the tax advantage for Gates. The Internal Revenue Service allows people to deduct up to 50 percent of declared income given to charity as long as they aren’t too involved in deciding where the money goes.
Gates’ active participation in the foundation reduces this personal income deduction to no more than 30 percent, Kramer said.”
This plus the fact that Bill Gate’s father actively lobbying Congress to NOT SCRAP the estates tax. Gates ain’t doing all this for tax write-offs.
Someone here said Sun is a great hardware AND software company.
Actually, Sun is really pretty bad at software, especially compared to the likes of IBM. Their hardware is good, maybe, but not as good as SGI’s as far as I can tell.
Virtually every software product (other than Solaris) that Sun sells was the result of the strategic acquisition of another smaller company.
What I heard is that IBM actually wrote most of the Java J2EE spec and code, not Sun, as a contributing member of the Java community and that when IBM application software developers called up Sun to talk to their counterparts there, well, there was virtually nobody they could talk to.
Maybe someone here could corroborate that for me…
And, of course, everyone here knows that HP was so disgusted with Sun’s implementation of the JVM (particularly for embedded devices) that they went ahead and wrote their own totally independent version completely from scratch (it is called Chai).
The smartest move Microsoft could make would be to license the Chai JVM from HP and embed it into Internet Explorer. That way their users get an excellent Java implementation and Sun still gets screwed to some extent and they score good brownie points with everyone.
What ever happened to Sun’s ‘revolutionary’ Jini technology? It was hyped to be as important as Java.
I’ll bet that it died a swift death because of Sun’s limitations as a software developer. Maybe they should have given the spec to IBM or HP so that the job would have gotten done right.
>>What ever happened to Sun’s ‘revolutionary’ Jini technology? It was hyped to be as important as Java.
>>I’ll bet that it died a swift death because of Sun’s limitations as a software developer. Maybe they should have given the spec to IBM or HP so that the job would have gotten done right.<<
It still looks alive and well to me…
http://www.sun.com/jini/
And I bet your next thought would be to tell me that Microsoft is the only true innovator in the computing industry, right?! As Robert X Cringley had put it in one of his books, Microsoft doesn’t innovate, they take ideas and innovations already in place, fool with it call it something else and market it as their own. Oh they do innovate some of their own products, but only a few are really worthy to speak of!
>>Virtually every software product (other than Solaris) that Sun sells was the result of the strategic acquisition of another smaller company.<<
Microsoft also buys (does ‘Visio’ come to mind, I could name others) and contracts out some of their work as well. Read the fine print on some of the licenses of their products to get a better idea!
Am I saying Microsoft products suck?… some do and some don’t! I am not a Windows user as you could probably tell. I do work around Sun hardware/software on a professional basis, so I know their products first hand!
CattBeMac, I wasn’t comparing Sun to Microsoft in any way so please don’t put words in my mouth about what I really think about Microsoft, OK.
If you are going to defend Sun from my comments, fine, but you should probably argue against the specific points that I made rather than dragging Microsoft into this.
I’ll admit that I don’t follow Jini in any specific way at all, so I might be underinformed there, but my statements regarding where pretty much all of Sun’s major software applications come from (acquisitions) is true. They are VERY underpowered in the software development area compared to IBM and HP, in my opinion. That is the only point I wanted to make.
Cheers
>>They are VERY underpowered in the software development area compared to IBM and HP, in my opinion. That is the only point I wanted to make.<<
That would be true since IBM probably has the biggest employment of programmers than anybody, I am not sure about HP. We do use HP/UX at work along with HP OpenViews, it’s pretty good and gets the job done.
Sorry to bring MS into this and I didn’t mean to piss in your Wheaties (or whatever cereal you eat). My point with Sun before your original post was to really point out that Sun needs to get off their arse and compete in the industry as a whole, not just in a specific market. No one can blame Microsoft for going after all the markets they can, of course they should play fair somewhat.
So sorry again for blasting ya, I will be more careful next time.
Regarding Bill Gates’s large donations, one of the first things you learn in economics 101 is: you can always tell when a large company is a monopoly because they spend more on trying to look good to the public rather than advertising.
Don’t believe that he’s being philanthropic for a minute: monopolists do what they have to do to keep their monopolies going.
Neat article here btw:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020307.html
—j
Qoute:
Virtually every software product (other than Solaris) that Sun sells was the result of the strategic acquisition of another smaller company.
name 1 good ms product which wasn’t at some point part of some acquisition or liecnced
SQL server, MS office, DOS, IE, all their games
all at least started by other companys
its how the industry works.
So who’s gona sue ms next? my money is on sony
or maybe palm
You’re right – to a very large extent, MS does acquire lots of companies. Take for example, Great Plains (WOW!).
However, they do have a strong internal development group that also does lots of original work:
Office (it’s original), Project, Exchange, IIS, Visual Studio, Office for Mac, MS Operations Manager (MOM), Systems Management Server (SMS), MS Messaging Server (MMS), MS Commerce Server, MS Content Management Server, MS Sharepoint Portal Server, MS Application Center…
All of these ‘servers’ are really huge applications too.
JohnG
You failed to distinguish between MSFT and Bill Gates; PR and philanthropy.
Whereas Microsoft gives most of its political contributions to the Republican party — Bill Gates and most of his senior executives give their political contributions to the Democratic party.
Whereas Microsoft avoids the tax bill by not distributing any dividend to its shareholders — Bill Gates created the largest charitable foundation in the world and takes an active role in the foundation to his own personal detriment from the taxation point of view. And Bill Gates Sr. lobbying (with Warren Buffet) the Congress to keep the estates tax.
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates get along so well because they are the only billionaires that actually goes to the voting booth (from the lowly school district elections to national elections) instead of buying politicians off, have a social conscience (from their personal, not their business lives) and aren’t divorcing for the Nth times and dating supermodels.
And talks about Bill Gates making $20+ Billion in charitable donations to give himself a good public image for the anti-trust trial is just non-sense. Enron donates only a couple of million dollars per year to the politicians and the whole Washington was on their leash. Microsoft spent $200 million on Windows 95 promotions and the whole world knows about it.
Would Bill Gates, the ruthless and brilliant businessman, spend $20+ Billion and accept such dismal results in improving his public image and political influence — especially comparing the most successful PR product launch in history (windows 95) was done with only 1% of Bill Gates’ charitable donation. Since tax laws require his foundation to give out 5% of the $20 Billion every year, he could “launch” a windows 95 sized public relations image improvement every 2.5 months.
My point is that if Bill Gates wants to improve his personal image, he can do it with much less money than $20+ Billion.
I should point out for the record that even though I do like Microsoft generally I do have a big problem with their blatant anticompetitive practices (like forcing OEMs to install only Windows on their PCs and not OS/2, BeOS, etc.). That really bothers me because they should only win market share when they deserve to, obviously. They should have had the integrity to compete on fair terms right from the beginning and not be twisting OEMs arms like that.
Even though they have been putting out some good product recently they have created so much animosity towards themselves over such a long period of time that this is not likely going to be enough to help save them from some painful losses in court. Well, too bad. If they played fair in the first place they wouldn’t be in this mess.
My attitude probably represents about the best that Microsoft can ever hope for from anyone.
> JohnG
>
> You failed to distinguish between MSFT and Bill Gates; PR and
> philanthropy.
The former was on purpose b/c MS is Bill’s baby — it’s his vehicle that provides him with the power he wants. As to the latter; I know the difference — philanthropy is when you don’t tell the whole world about it.
> Whereas Microsoft gives most of its political contributions…
I don’t know what a political contribution is — I’m talking about monetary contributions here.
> …and takes an active role in the foundation to his own personal
> detriment from the taxation point of view.
I’m sure that the business advantage to MS outweighs Bill’s own personal detriment here. That’s the only reason he’d be doing it. Look at his/MS’s track record — they don’t spend 20 billion (your number) to be nice.
> [Bill has] a social conscience (from their personal, not their
> business lives)
I guess his donations paid off (in your case anyhow).
> And talks about Bill Gates making $20+ Billion in charitable
> donations to give himself a good public image for the anti-trust
> trial is just non-sense. Enron donates only a couple of million
> dollars per year to the politicians and the whole Washington was
> on their leash.
I guess MS makes a better date than Enron, eh? No skimping on the champagne.
> Microsoft spent $200 million on Windows 95 promotions and the
> whole world knows about it.
Exactly my point. Bill is making charitible donations much in excess of that — just what monopolists do, protect their public image more than they advertise.
> Since tax laws require his foundation to give out 5% of the $20
> Billion every year, he could “launch” a windows 95 sized public
> relations image improvement every 2.5 months.
You’re not getting it; the whole point is that he spends more on showing “what a great guy he is” rather than on advertising his company’s products. The reason: As a monopoly that abuses its market position to stifle competition (in its chosen markets), MS has very little competition (which is the cornerstone of capitalism). He’s gotta show what a benevolent software dictator he is lest the public decide they want MS prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
“The more the merrier!”
Regardless of Sun’s chances (or AOL, or Be, Inc.) the best thing to come of these multiple lawsuits against M$ is the fact that it’s not just the DOJ (who listens to them anyway?) going to court against Bill Gates and M$.
John Q. Public and the businesses are sitting back taking all this in. Sooner or later, the suit that broke the camel’s back will be filed, and the software and OS market will begin to open up.
Bill Gates cannot afford to fight on all fronts at once!!!
Actually I’m suprised Scott McWhiny didn’t think of this sooner.
What I’m really suprised at is that McNumnuts wasn’t complaining about Be, Inc. beating them to the punch.
What would have been funnier is if Microsoft had sued themselves and beat ol’ Scooter to the punch. The whine level have been amazing!
“What I heard is that IBM actually wrote most of the Java J2EE spec and code, not Sun, as a contributing member of the Java community and that when IBM application software developers called up Sun to talk to their counterparts there, well, there was virtually nobody they could talk to.”
Heard is the operative word here. You should have learned by now that hear-say is usually has nothing to do with reality. Java was designed from the start by Sun engineers beginning in 1991. The project was led by Patrick Naughton and James Gosling at the time. IBM on the otherhand is a licensees of Java, they had nothing to do with its development. Sun still writes the whole of the Java platform includeing Java2.
“Actually, Sun is really pretty bad at software, especially compared to the likes of IBM. Their hardware is good, maybe, but not as good as SGI’s as far as I can tell.”
Have you ever even used a SPARC? Do you even know the name of even one? I’ve personally owned a Sun Blade (the new one) and a SPARCClassic I bought off ebay. Very nice machines BTW. I have no love for Solaris, but the hardware is much better than any pc hardware. I run OpenBSD on the classic, but I can’t find anything other than Solaris to run on the Blade (still fun to use). I’ve also used SGIs. IRIX is absolutely the worst UNIX I have ever tried. All I can say is that it’s so different, you can’t get anything to compile or run that wasn’t specifically written for it. The hardware is on par with Sun’s.
Most of Sun’s market share loss is to *BSD and Linux. Why? Because it’s cheaper to maintain. Solaris is one of the last Propietary UNIX operating systems left. Most companies are switching to save money not because Sun has bad software.
As far as Java goes, it’s a great platform. I am not a fan of the VM concept, but I do like the language. I’m hoping that the native compilers will come along far enough so that the VM is not needed. Java is in fact so good that you probably can’t find a single computer science department that doesn’t teach a course or two on it.
You’ve got to had a lot of this to Be, Inc. In their court filing they pointed to the Java issue multiple times (I’ve read the entire thing). This new suit can only strengthen the case that Be, Inc. has, and Be’s case can only help Sun. The more of these companies that jump on this bandwagon of privitly filing suit, the better.
As we’ve all seen, the DOJ has been ‘pimped out’ and isn’t going to do a dang thing to stop Microsoft. Our only hope is the dispair of the companies that have been hit hard.
At least, that’s how I see it.
-Bryan
Vowed BeOS non-conformist.
“If you think the world sucks, quit complaining and do something about it.”
When Microsoft created the IE/Explorer combo – all they had to do to keep from being anti-competitive was to publish the hooks they used to intertwine the two, and create a control panel to allow you to select from other browsers on your system that respond to these hooks. That’s what they didn’t do, that was anti-competitive.
Had they provided the necessary documentation to implement these hooks, and had they created a user-selectable way of deciding what browser to use for them, there would be no issue here.
As it is, from a technological standpoint, I agree with Microsoft in integrating the browser and the ‘desktop’. In fact, I applaud it. BUT — The fact that they used unethical business practices when they did it appals me. The idea was good – the implementation was from hell.
-Bryan
>>>>philanthropy is when you don’t tell the whole world about it.
The world DIDN’T know about it. That’s why people like you question the 20+ Billion figure as “your number”.
>>>I’m sure that the business advantage to MS outweighs Bill’s own personal detriment here. That’s the only reason he’d be doing it.
Just think about it. Bill Gates owns something like 13% of Microsoft stock and Microsoft’s market cap is like $350 Billion. In order for Gates to just “break even”, Microsoft’s market cap has to increase by $153 Billion to $483 Billion.
My point is that there are much better (and cheaper) ways to “soften” his image. Do you think such a brilliant businessman would suddenly turn stupid and spent 20 billion dollars on a such dismal image improvement campaign? Do you think the people who brought out the world’s most successful product launch suddenly turn stupid and can’t promote the fact that Gates is the world’s biggest philanthropist?
Fact is that increasing Microsoft’s market cap by $153 Billion just to break even pretty much tells you that Gates ain’t doing it to make Microsoft more money. Fact is that most people don’t know about his sizable donations and questions the $20 Billion figure pretty much tells you that he ain’t advertising it. Fact is that Gates can spend 1% of that $20 Billion dollars and can “launch” himself in a global image improvement promotion with much bigger results — i.e. new clothes, kill the glasses and go for contact lenses and drop the nerd image.
That would be $503 Billion market cap to break even.
Sun does not develop Java specs on its own anymore. They get LOTS of help from other JCP corporate members. IMHO Sun simply does not have the software development expertise to go it alone on creating a spec like J2EE and they probably got plenty of help from IBM.
“The Java Community Process (JCP) is the way the Java platform evolves. It’s an open organization of international Java developers and licensees whose charter is to develop and revise Java technology specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits. Both Java technology and the JCP were originally created by Sun Microsystems, however, the JCP has evolved from the informal process that Sun used beginning in 1995, to a formalized process overseen by representatives from many organizations across the Java community.” – from the homepage
ANYONE in the JCP can submit specification drafts for Java technologies. This is what I think IBM did, many times. Look…
http://www.jcp.org/resources/guide/index.en.jsp
“Sun does not develop Java specs on its own anymore.”
Specification and implimentation are two entirely seperate things. The specificaton process is open so that Java can be as cross platform compatible as possible. This doesn’t mean that Sun out-sources it’s programming jobs.
“Expert:
Any Member can nominate an Expert to serve on one of the Expert Groups that write Java specifications. Individuals not affiliated with a Member can also nominate themselves to serve on an Expert Group. Experts can:
1. actively shape the content and direction of new and revised Java specifications (Expert Group),
2. review comments from Members and the Public and use them to improve the quality of a specification (Community Review, Public Review),
3. an Expert who is a JCP Member may serve as the Specification Lead of the Expert Group and be responsible for choosing the other members of the Expert Group and for completing the specification, ***ITS REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION***, and associated compatibility test suites (Initiate A New or Revised Specification, Create the Community Draft, Complete the Specification),
4. a JCP Member on an Expert Group may assume responsibility for maintaining a specification after it is written (Maintenance Lead).”
http://www.jcp.org/participation/overview/
I am still convinced that IBM did most of the real work on J2EE and other (recent) parts of Java. If Sun was not the license holder for Java they probably would have lost control of it to IBM long ago. Sun’s corporate culture does not include any serious competence in general software development, although they maintain their products competently. At least compared to IBM or HP.
IBM’s implementation capabilities are amazing. They know how to administrate, secure and deploy Windows 2000 in any configuration you can imagine better than Microsoft does. Microsoft has admitted this and refers it’s big corporate customers to IBM’s whitepapers in this area. Same deal with Java application development – IBM has more skills and knowledge at this than Sun will ever have, because of the tools it makes and it’s huge consulting division.
Sorry if I came off as a bit snarky in my comments earlier. I didn’t mean to sound that way.