Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun’s software group said in an eWeek article that practically every Sun employee owns an Apple desktop at home. “We would love to partner with Apple,” he said. “They’re everyone’s favorite company, and iTunes is really cool.”
The comments were included in an article that looks at “Mad Hatter,” Sun’s in-the-works unified desktop that Sun plans to sell for half the price of a Windows environment. Mad Hatter is Sun’s effort to cut into the Windows/Office domination of the desktop personal computer.
As with StarOffice, which is built upon the work of the OpenOffice.org developers, Mad Hatter will include a third-party Linux GUI (graphical user interface) such as GNOME, the Mozilla browser, Sun’s StarOffice suite, the Evolution e-mail server, the GAIM messaging client and Java — “and it will be priced to undercut Microsoft, according to eWeek.
Posting to Infoworld’s Techwatch Weblog, Mark Jones also makes reference to Schwartz’s comments in a recent entry entitled Sun tips Apple hat. Sun’s desktop efforts are called “uncannily like Apple’s OS X,” and quotes Schwartz on application icons as saying, “Apple’s done some cool things with these.”