The elephant in the room when Sun Microsystems and Microsoft announced their fairly stunning detente was commoditization — the pressure from widely available, low-cost alternatives.
Go behind the rhetoric and Microsoft's promise to pay Sun nearly $2 billion. You'll find long-term trends that have to be gnawing at the companies' chief executives, Scott McNealy of Sun and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, who shared the stage in a news conference and acted like friends.
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