The two CEOs started off Tuesday's event with banter. McNealy drew big laughs when he started off by asking Ellison, 'We've got to get this out of the way: Are you buying Sun?' Ellison retorted that McNealy would have to read about it in the newspapers first, because 'Oracle likes to do everything hostilely.'

McNealy later said he had hoped to recount Oracle and Sun's shared history together, including the ill-fated Network Computer, but 'marketing wouldn't let us get that in there.' Ellison's reply: 'Let Google make a network computer -- they're young and foolish.'

Ellison also said that Sun and Oracle are committed to standards-based computing -- even if it means they could get 'beat on price' by competitors -- in contrast with Microsoft, which 'goes off on their own proprietary direction.'

The high-profile event featuring two of the industry's best-known CEOs felt at times like a repeat of Sun and Google's public get-together in October. After rampant speculation preceeding the event, McNealy and Google CEO Eric Schmidt simply announced that Google Toolbar would be bundled with downloads of Java Runtime Environment.

McNealy seemed to acknowledge that, at one point saying: 'There's not a ton of news today.'