Friends and enemies

THE high-techindustry is heading for another painful round of consolidation. While researching our Microsoft .Next report (go to www.infoworld.com/news/hnmsreport.html ), I developed some perspectives on intertitan relationships from Microsoft's point of view.

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MS has the money and clout to make its friends rich and its enemies miserable. These musings are speculative, but IT organizations should consider them when evaluating their major tech suppliers. The friends of the vendors you choose will, in effect, become your partners. You'll be pressured to forsake their enemies, and companies on the enemies list will make it their mission to convert you.

Sun actively campaigned for the Microsoft Enemy No. 1 spot through Scott McNealy's tireless invective and through the company's involvement in antitrust actions. I don't think being in Microsoft's crosshairs is as much fun lately. Sun no longer has an in with the Justice Department. Even Sun's longtime champion Oracle is waffling, so Sun can only make its case to the market.

It's not much of a case. The best way Sun knew to fight .Net was to give ONE (Open Net Environment) away, albeit with strings attached. Hey, it could work. But it's just as likely that its flea-market tactics will leave Sun hurting. If IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Microsoft join forces to stomp Sun -- the one goal (other than making money) they can all get behind -- Sun will need a stronger message than "we're not Microsoft" to stay relevant.

IBM resists being viewed as an outright friend of Microsoft but gets a pass from the enemies' list because Microsoft admires and fears IBM. These two superpowers are awkwardly groping for dÈtente. They'd like to spin their offerings as synergistic rather than competitive. MS would love to have IBM for a friend; it might even learn to tolerate Java if IBM took it over.

HP skated off the enemies list when it bought Microsoft darling Compaq. The Digital Equipment assets Compaq hadn't already squandered will get chopped after HP finishes moving in. HP becomes an official friend after it nukes the Unix-only PA-RISC and Alpha CPUs. HP's Itanium systems will be able to run Windows.

Intel is an interesting study in what it's like to try to stay neutral in Microsoft's world. Intel took advantage of Microsoft's distractions to put HP-UX and Linux on equal footing with Windows on its Itanium 64-bit platform. How did this go over? MS delayed the announcement of Itanium 2 support for Windows .Net Server, even though the commitment was already made.

What's worse, MS execs are telling developers that Intel's 64-bit architecture is inferior to AMD's Hammer/Opteron (x86-64). No one at MS has explicitly made the connection, but it looks to me like Intel got taken to the woodshed for its disloyalty. MS will keep the pressure on by playing Intel and AMD against each other, and I think they can threaten both with the possibility of bringing Windows back to the IBM Power processor. Wouldn't that make a nice present for a new friend?