Pessimism Leads to Weakness, Optimism to Power

摘要

As I write this editorial, I am waiting, like hundreds and thousands of people worldwide, to hear whether (and if so, how) Sun and Google are going to be teaming up to take on Microsoft in its holiest of holy markets, the desktop. Could such an alliance have been dreamed of just one year ago? The answer, of course, is "Yes!" Nothing has prevented Sergey Brin and Larry Page from nipping from Mountain View to San Jose long ago and dreaming up an imaginative combination of Google's brand recognition and Sun's desire to liberate desktop apps from the desktop and shift them to the network. However, there is something about the prevailing mood of Q4 of 2005, just begun, that seems to be supremely conducive to a new kind of corporate symbiosis in which companies don't merely just gobble each other up, Oracle-PeopleSoft style, but genuinely seek to create various technology wholes that are greater than the sum of the technology parts.