Scoble alerts me to news I find simply shocking: Sun and Microsoft have settled their legal differences. Slashdot has a discussion and The Register has an article. Biggest parts of the news to me are that:
- Sun gets $2 billion cash from the nearly bottomless MSFT coffers;
- Sun drops all outstanding litigation–meaning their very significant antitrust lawsuit–pending against MSFT and neither company will sue each otherover patent issues for the next 10 years;
- Sun is firing yet another 10% of its employees, meaning it has now dumped over 14,000 employees (out of what was 44,000) since 2001 and I truly wonder what this will mean in terms of product development; and,
- Sun promoted software head Jonathan Schwartz to president and chief operating officer, giving McNealey a bit of support he hasn’t had since Zander left and announced preliminary Q3 results of a loss in the 6-8 cents per share range not counting extraordinary items, below Street expectations.
On this news, MSFT stock is up 2.31% (58 cents) while SUNW is up 19.81% (83 cents).
BillSaysThis 