The General Bills

There's a Gabriel Garcia Marquez character in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The General, who disappears into the jungle as a teen and spends the rest of his life fighting a guerilla war against the government. He just doesn't have any other ideas for what to do with all those years between puberty and senility.

In their own endless conflict, Microsoft and Sun have both arrived at next-generation strategies that give ground to gain ground. Hailstorm is built around XML, which Sun initially underwrote. Jxta uses the default Microsoft JVM, which is version 1.1 of Java. For both sides this kind of thinking would have been anathema a couple years ago. Anybody remember Microsoft Blackbird, the network that was better than the Internet? Anybody remember Sun fighting to the death in court to control minutiae of the JVM?

Neither side was aware of their limitations until the smoke cleared from the web boom of the 90s. At that point they looked around, saw the other guy still standing, and decided to give sneakiness a try.

At the core the fight is about a couple guys -- Bill Joy and Bill Gates -- growing old together. Year after year shooting at each other in the jungle, and, once in a rare while, learning a little.

Viva la revoluci�n!