Is Microsoft changing its stripes?

Now that Microsoft's six-year anti-trust battle is over and the company has hammered out historic partnerships with bitter rivals Sun and Oracle, is the vendor on a path to becoming a kinder, gentler industry titan?

"I'm not so sure kinder and gentler is the starting point to describe Microsoft. It's more like being more pragmatic," says Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata. "Pragmatism means companies like Microsoft, Sun and Oracle can somewhat bury the hatchet and work together, but it's certainly not warm feelings all around. It's an enlightened self-interest."

The pragmatism, which has been nurtured in the four years since Steve Ballmer took over as Microsoft's CEO, and the heightened self-interest have been born from changes in the industry and the economy.

"Don't mistake [these partnerships] for altruism. It is forces in the marketplace that the industry has to respond to," says Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, an industry group that backed Microsoft during its anti-trust trial and in May added Oracle to its list of 3,000 members. "It's a maturation of vendors as well as customers. The customers are beyond gee-whiz and now have platforms that need to work together. They are demanding it from the vendors."

Those demands show that end users have soured on the acrimonious battles between Microsoft and its rivals that have stymied interoperability and raised network costs. Microsoft, Sun and Oracle hope their partnerships can correct those trends.

Experts say Microsoft has not so much changed its spots as it has adapted to prevailing attitudes and realized that partners, rivals and end users now share a portion of the driver's seat Microsoft hogged for the past decade.

"The '90s were a great decade for Microsoft in that it set the standard and others followed," says Paul DeGroot, an analyst with research firm Directions on Microsoft. "But with the rise of the Internet and rising concerns over Microsoft's dominance, people saw the other side of the coin in that if they let Microsoft set the standard, it would be hard to have any choices."

It's the waning of that dominance that has Microsoft in a friendlier mood, experts say. The company is partnering and bowing to customer demands because of pressure from Java development tools, alternative operating systems such as Linux, and to the emergence of Web services.

"We collectively think all of this partnering is a good thing," says Steve Linstead, program manager and directory services architect for Johnson Controls, a Milwaukee supplier of automotive parts and building controls, including those for heating and cooling. "If these partnerships work out, it will help our interoperability issues substantially. If Microsoft and the others truly make the customers' needs their focus, that would be the Holy Grail for us," he says. "But words without action are meaningless."

Most of what exists is words in the Sun-Microsoft partnership, which was signed in April and promised to improve interoperability among their products.