Microsoft and Sun
Wow. Microsoft is giving $2 billion to Sun as part of a number of settlements and whatnot. I'm sure a lot of pundits will have a lot to say about this, but I think it could end up being good for users for a number of reasons.
Basically, whenever either company starts something, the other company starts a competing something. It didn't start out that way - the Microsoft JVM was actually a pretty good piece of technology - but lately, there hasn't been a lot of love between these companies.
Now, well, cultures are hard to change and this might not mean a lot in the end, but if it means that Microsoft and Sun can collaborate on something like single signon (Passport vs Liberty), that'll benefit a lot of people. Real integration between the JVM and the CLR would be awesome, too.
I guess we'll see how it plays out. Microsoft's support of Corel didn't do them a whole lot of good in the end - giving a dying company a big pile of cash can just make them stop paying so much attention to the bottom line when they should be, so that when the cash runs out they don't have a chance..