This is not an April Fools joke. The sky above may be closer than it appears.

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems announced a surprising armistice yesterday, ending years of public acrimony ...

In a separate announcement yesterday, Sun said it would lay off 3,300 employees, or 9 percent of its work force.

Both McNealy and Ballmer spoke of how much the balance of power in technology markets had shifted ...

... Sun will increasingly become a software company ...

Nick Carr was right. IT doesn't matter, and Gates, Ballmer, and McNealy agree with him.

Don't buy the line about competing with each other. Microsoft and Sun find themselves on the same side in a desperate struggle to remain relevant, and both are losing hard and fast.

Here's a meme for you:

IT is 1, and there is only 1 IT. You're either with IT or against IT. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

Coming in May: Carly Fiorina and Michael Dell join forces!

Coming in July: General Electric buys IBM; market sighs.

Don't Panic!

Microsoft and Sun End Long Acrimony in Surprise Accord

And will the imposition of this legal and economic burden impede further exponential advances like those the computer industry has made in the past decade?

This symposium was held on March 13 at Stanford Law School. Participants included Michael Froomkin, Pamela Samuelson, and many others at the intersection of new technologies, intellectual property, and law.

Securing Privacy in the Internet Age

After 9/11, Jones served on a Markle Foundation task force and became engaged in the privacy problem. His response was to invent ANNA, a system that anonymizes data.

Geek War on Terror

Dyson: "How to learn. ... The ability to listen, to understand patterns, to see what's going on, to motivate other people, ..."

Esther Dyson ... In Focus

Bray: "I just totally don't get it."

I really thought Tim had it there for a second. Too bad Bill Joy already skipped out; a Joy-Bray collaboration would have been interesting.

Even so, the Jim Gray meme is right on point. I've been saying that since before I saw Gray at MIT two years ago, telling everyone about how Next Day FedEx could offer higher bandwidth at lower cost than any telco. (Consider the 747 as an extremely long, fat pipe and brown cardboard boxes as packets.)

Tim Bray, on New Role at Sun

Gates: "Well, I'm very excited about the breakthroughs that will take place in computer science over the next five years and the next ten years. And it's a paradox to me that people are expecting less, now, than they did, say, in 1999, where there was the bubble, the hype, and all that ... and yet, the really neat stuff, whether it's how you use computers in the home, or in business, or education, that's what's in front of us."

Bill Gates, with Charlie Rose, for the hour. It's worth the listen. (I mentioned this last week. The streaming audio is now available. This is a RealAudio link.)

Microsoft's Bill Gates on The Charlie Rose Show

But what has really carried Google to the top is a change in our perception of the Internet.

Memestreams is a core Internet technology.

Behind the Rise of Google Lies the Rise in Internet Credibility

Radar Networks, Inc. is a software company that is pioneering the next layer of the Internet -- the Semantic Web. Our software products help people, groups, organizations and communities manage and share information in a new way. The company was started by Lucid Ventures and is located in New York City. We are presently in stealth-mode.

Commentary from a contributor to Jeremy Zawodny's weblog:

It's the biggest thing that has hit Silicon Valley since Netscape ... Nova Spivack has been working on this for years with his MIT genius CTO Kris Thorensen.

The Radar Networks demo has literally blown Sand Hill Road out of their chairs and has become a thing of epic legend in the last month.

XML cannot keep pace with info overload. It's about Metadata and allowing RSS/RDF to function semantically; this has enormous implications to existing database and router architecture. And if by adopting this we could solve spam, allow darknets and scale to billions of users ... Guess what, Google may need to rethink timing on S-1 filings and Microsoft may end-up [canceling] Longhorn or at least renaming it LongGone or LongGong.

So yee want to see Social Networking really scale, intelligently? Jeremy, thou needest Radar!

Posted by: Hugh J. Sloan III on January 30, 2004 10:17 PM

Radar Networks

Microsoft is intently poring over Google's portfolio of patents, hunting for potential vulnerabilities.

Surely they will find something. The only way to win a patent war would be to get IBM on your side.

Today, nearly everyone in Silicon Valley ... has begun to ask: Will Google become the next Netscape?

Google should certainly be less naive than Netscape, but that's certainly no immunity. Innovation will be the key factor.

Last year, Rick Rashid came to Silicon Valley to give a demonstration of an experimental Microsoft Research search engine. Shortly afterward, Mike Burrows, one of the original pioneers of Internet search at Digital Equipment who later helped design Microsoft's experimental search engine, quietly defected. He joined Google.

How much did he know? High-level defections could be a major strategic blow. Going forward, both firms will have to compartmentalize their work and confine the full Vision to the inner circle. This will slow them down, if nothing else.

Microsoft has already begun a recruitment campaign aimed at demoralizing Google employees. Microsoft recruiters have been calling Google employees at home, urging them to join Microsoft.

Microsoft the telemarketer ...

I'd be interested in hearing the pitch.

The Coming Search Wars

The IAC publication launch can be seen live (3 - 4 pm New York time) as a webcast on the UN website www.un.org/webcast or it may be accessed there at a later time. A press conference with the IAC speakers will precede the publication launch event.

Inventing A Better Future