Customers in Charge

Computerworld - No question about it, this one belongs to you. IT customers were the driving force, the ultimate bottom line, the wake-up-to-reality call behind the historic Sun-Microsoft accord announced the morning of April 2 . Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer spoke softly but carried a big peace treaty with your names on it -- wrapping up years of angry rhetoric and a fierce, often counterproductive rivalry that bedeviled enterprise IT operations with interoperability headaches and unnecessary expense.
"We're in a new era of customer-driven competition," Ballmer said.
McNealy agreed, "The customer is in charge."
No kidding. But were you impressed by this dramatically staged ending to the industry's most legendary feud? Well, not exactly.
"I want to see something concrete and real," said Daniel Morreale, CIO at the North Bronx Healthcare Network in New York, voicing what was no doubt the skeptical reaction of many of his peers across the nation.
Tony Scott, chief technology officer at General Motors, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal about his pointed advice to both CEOs to get their acts together. He's had to educate the pair on "the real pain that customers go through when you have multiple incompatible standards and technologies."
That message seems to have finally struck its target. McNealy and Ballmer, usually glib and cheerfully combative with the press, were subdued and serious at the announcement of their truce. Once the initial element of surprise wears off, they'll have a lot to prove. As technology buyers have gained more power over suppliers, they've lost patience with petty product warfare.
"It's good that there is going to be an era of cooperation, but what does it really mean to people?" asked Satish Ajmani, CIO of the Santa Clara County government in Sun's home state of California. "What are they going to deliver that's different from what we have today, and will it result in an overall cost reduction for us?"

Answering those questions had better be the primary focus of both vendors as they move into detente. Microsoft will pay its longtime rival $1.6 billion to settle Sun's antitrust suit and resolve several patent claims. Far more meaningful to users, however, is the potential of the 10-year commitment to collaborate on technology and to license each other's intellectual property.
Customers will be waiting -- and not all that patiently -- to see the concrete follow-through on those lofty assurances of improvements in server integration, easier interoperability between products such as Java and .Net, and seamless support of each other's protocols.
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