Separated at birth?

Way back when, I promised photos of Sun’s Steve Ballmer lookalike. Readers of Pat Patterson’s blog will already know it’s him because he admitted as much when describing the experience of putting together the Sun-Microsoft event back in May.

Honestly, the Sun folks at that event didn’t even think of the resemblance until the Microsoft people started exclaiming about it. Well, judge for yourself (plenty of Ballmer images here):

That’s Pat with Don Schmidt of Microsoft. They ran the web single sign-on demo together and did a really professional job, along with Emily Xu and Lauren Wood (Sun) and Ryan Johnson (Microsoft) behind the scenes. Here’s Pat with Emily and also Dan Dinhoble, another valuable contributor to the proceedings (oh, and I think that’s Ryan behind Emily at the extreme left of the pic):

Emily Xu, Dan Dinhoble, and Pat Patterson of Sun

Apparently Pat continued to cause double-takes at JavaOne last week, where Microsoft gave a number of talks. He even inadvertently performed an act of impersonation by simply hanging out at the Microsoft booth — where one of the booth workers turned to him, addressed him as Steve, and started talking! I guess wetware-based coarse-grained biometrics isn’t a very good form of authentication.

Pat gave a presentation and did the web single sign-on demo again with Hubert Le Van Gong on Multiple Platforms, Single Identity: Interoperable Identity (Hubert describes it here and Pat points to people’s notes on both of his talks here), and I think they had the audience fooled for a second about who was really up on that stage…