Tech Update: So we've been hearing a lot about an old Arab proverb recently which is the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

McNealy: So we've got a lot of friends.

Tech Update: You just talked about a few companies like Vodafone, but one company that rises to the top and has a lot of transactional IDs is America Online. And they're obviously in a blood bath with Microsoft for transactional IDs. Is that a potential partner?

McNealy: AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft have been invited to join the Liberty environment.

Tech Update: But do you as the CEO of Sun see AOL as a partner to Sun?

McNealy: Oh, absolutely. They're a big customer of ours. We're a big customer of theirs. We're doing joint development work. Obviously we've done the iPlanet joint development, which has basically run its course and is now a Sun business unit, but we'll continue to do work on the browser and I will continue to do work in a whole bunch of other spaces and places.

Editor's note: Shortly after this interview, AOL announced it would become a founding member of Sun's Liberty Alliance.

Tech Update: Going back to the killer app, Microsoft Office has been that killer app for Windows on the desktop.

Tech Update: That's such a well-named term for Microsoft. It kills you. Actually, Lookout has turned out to be a bigger killer app. I mean Outlook. What's the new virus that's running around today?

Berlind: If you had installed the patches for it a while ago, you would've been protected.

Tech Update: I'm protected and I didn't install any patches. I don't run Windows.

Berlind: So, what about a Java-based MS Office killer that subscribes to your very vision, which is services on demand, software as a service?

Tech Update: Well in fact we do have the killer strategy for that. It's StarOffice. It's free. It's downloadable from our Web site to any and everybody. I think we've downloaded over five million copies to date, and that may be out of date on what that number is now. We've handed out millions of CDs. And we allow people to share and copy and duplicate, all the rest of it. It runs on Linux, runs on Windows, runs on Solaris. It also has a server-based architecture we call the Sun Portal Architecture so that you can have these productivity environments from a service provider. So service providers will be implementing this as a service to their customers so that literally from your Java-enabled phone you can look at and review StarOffice documents, forward them on, do that sort of thing. We showed those demos many times on stage, and that's the way the world will go. Now [MS-Office] is a pretty strong monopoly and they do everything they can to get you trapped into the Office hairball. My suggestion to all companies is use Netscape, use free StarOffice and put everything in a browser-readable format, not in the Office format. It's smaller, faster, cheaper, more reliable, safer--way better than paying the Microsoft monopoly tax.

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