By Barbara Darrow ,
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- Two industry titans painted vastly different worldviews of the future of technology this week.
Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer called a contention by rival Sun Microsystems chairman and CEO Scott McNealy that software is merely a feature of hardware "the most absurd thing I've heard in my life."
"Software is the future," Ballmer said.
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On Tuesday at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo here, McNealy predicted the demise of the standalone software world, saying software is merely a feature of hardware devices--or systems--from handheld appliances to big servers.
"Software is a feature, not an industry," he said.
"That, my friends, is why you ought to steer clear of Sun," Ballmer responded Wednesday morning.
It is software, not "big honking Sun servers" that makes for big scalable Web servers, Ballmer countered in response to a question from a Gartner analyst.
"Even companies like EMC know that their real value is in software," Ballmer said. "Seventy-five percent of their engineering goes into software development. Sun just doesn 't get it."
Executives like McNealy and Oracle chairman Larry Ellison -- both of whom are pushing a centrally controlled server-centric IT environment -- seem to want to deny the existence of the 500 million PCs in use in the world, Ballmer said.
"People want their data and applications and their local hard disk and not revert totally to a centralized system," he said.
In speaking to conference attendees, McNealy portrayed Sun Microsoystems Inc. (stock: SUNW) as not a chip or server company, but a maker of "FBWSes" or "big freaking webtone servers," essentially black boxes whose inner workings are a mystery but that basically always work. He said the Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT) model of one company providing software for another company's hardware leads to incompatibility and confusion.
Questions about microprocessors and inner workings of devices were dismissed as irrelevant.
"That is so last-millennium to talk about," he said repeatedly.
People who did not know better might be forgiven for not knowing that Sun is, in fact, a chip company. Just weeks ago it unveiled its first UltraSparc III-based workstations and servers.
But hardware vendors like Sun will increasingly deliver closed, always-on systems, McNealy said.
"Lucent wouldn't allow EMC to come in, open up the back of their box, and stick in some random piece of hardware, nor would AT&T let them," he said.
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