I know this is like “so” yesterday, but I thought I would post up my thoughts on the recent Sun/Microsoft love in. This one really took me by surprise, after years of complete zealotry from the Sun CEO this is the last thing that I expected.

Personally I think that Sun lost its marbles when they decided to make Microsoft regret “embracing and extending” the Java platform, and, at the same time jump off the Microsoft Research gravy train (remember, Microsoft at the time had one of the fastest JVM implementations around - not sure how it compares now).

I can't help but think that Sun is in a death spiral and at some point in the future will be forced to bow out. For quite some time now I've felt that IBM is the industries Java powerhouse even more so now that Eclipse seems to be coming of age. It makes me think whether Eclipse could be a hospitable home for .NET developers (sets task in Outlook to pick through Eclipse souce) - but I digress.

One thing is for sure, it's going to be interesting to see what this new era of cooperation between Microsoft and Sun will result in. I'm hoping for better tools and interoperability.