From the “You heard it here first” department

If you read Clash of the Titans on this site earlier, you saw my opinion that Microsoft and BEA should get to be closer friends. So I read with obvious interest the announcement that Microsoft and JBoss are forming an alliance.
The MS-JBoss partnership strikes most people as a headscratcher, but on deeper examination, it looks like a pretty shallow marketing deal. No great product innovations seem imminent here.

Watch for the type of integration I predicted before, though. It could come out of the JBoss partnership, or it could yet come from BEA. As I wrote earlier, an independent BEA or JBoss pushing .Net has a unique appeal that wouldn’t be matched should Microsoft just snap up one of these vendors.

Nevertheless, every once in a while, you see people ask things like “Who will buy BEA?”

Ok, so no predictions have come true to the letter yet, but if you squint, you can see shapes coming into focus. Keep watching this space….