[ Thanks to Matt for
this link. ]
“IBM will pay $2.1 billion in cash to acquire modeling tools
company Rational Software, in a bid to win over more application
developers…“Analysts said the move underscores IBM’s ambitions to gain the
loyalty of developers and woo them away from Microsoft’s .Net
initiative. Bringing Rational into the IBM fold will also give more
momentum to IBM’s open-source Eclipse project, which aims to foster
interoperability among different Java-oriented tools, analysts
said.“‘This is a stunning deal and a big win for IBM,’ said James
Governor, an analyst at RedMonk. ‘This massively solidifies IBM’s
position and puts significant pressure on Microsoft…'”