One year and one month after Sun and Microsoft announced their landmark settlement, their chief executives Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer took the stage this morning in Palo Alto, California, to underline their ongoing collaboration.

The two vendors showed off a single sign-on technology that allows for interoperability between Liberty and WS-* standards. Although the Sun-Microsoft collaboration aims to go much deeper in the future, today's announcement is pretty much possible through the identity meta system that Microsoft showed off on Thursday at the Digital Identity World conference in San Francisco.

Today's gettogether between the two companies isn't much more than a nice photo-op. Single sign-on between .Net and Liberty? It might be nice and usable technology, but do we really need McNeally and Ballmer to come out and show this?

Not really, one industry analyst at the event told vnunet.com. But the companies haven't had much to show for their collaboration. A photo-op was called for, and is what we got.

13 May 2005