Atenção: As questões de números 19 a 22 referem-se ao texto abaixo.

Compatibility, and Not Just in Products

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 13 ? There were no colorful references to "Windows hairballs" or descriptions of the Microsoft executive team as "Beavis and Butthead," and the message was a relatively drab pronouncement about interchangeable software plumbing for corporate computing customers. But the event was notable all the same.

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, and his counterpart and onetime archenemy at Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, took the stage in a hotel conference room here today to report on their efforts to make their software programs communicate. The collaboration was announced a year ago in the wake of the landmark settlement to Sun's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

The purpose of the news conference was to show progress toward their stated goal of making it possible for customers to move easily between the companies' rival products.

Last year Mr. Ballmer and Mr. McNealy shocked the computer industry by appearing jointly in San Francisco to announce a 10-year technical collaboration coupled with a financial settlement of more than $1.95 billion. As part of the agreement, Microsoft has continued making smaller payments to Sun to cover patent licenses, and Sun has recently licensed technology from Microsoft as well.

The alliance has been developed in the last year and the first step is a specification called Web Single Sign-On, creating interconnecting systems for establishing security privileges, known as authentication. The instructions are available now for software developers and will begin to appear in products later this year.

Next month the companies will begin a more ambitious joint effort aimed at letting programmers write software that communicates between the .Net programming environment from Microsoft and the Java software environment of Sun.

But in an interview today after the news conference, neither executive was willing to commit to a date for the release of commercial products that would make such interoperability possible.

_{(Adapted from The New York Times, May 14, 2005)}