A Penguin in the Orchard

Mixed Response to Google/Sun Deal

I’ve read several analyses of the joint announcement by Google and Sun yesterday that they would “promote and distribute jointly each other’s products.” [Times Online]. No one really seems to know how to interpret the annoucement, and the analyses are all over the map. There’s this, for instance:

Google and Sun horse trading by ZDNet’s Dan Farber — The Google-Sun collaboration has kept us busy the last two days–trying to figure out what was in the works and now deciphering the actual announcement. There was rampant speculation that Google would launch an MS Office killer based on OpenOffice bits, but that wasn’t even close. Google will somehow help promote and distribute OpenOffice. No details were [...]

Then, there’s this:

Yahoo! News - SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Internet search king Google and US tech giant Sun Microsystems said they were teaming up to offer free spreadsheet and word-processing software online in a head-on challenge to rival Microsoft.

The two companies announced a deal under which they will allow all web users to access Sun’s OpenOffice — its equivalent to the dominant Microsoft Office program — from any personal computer.

The latter seems to clearly indicate that the deal is intended to take on Microsoft in the Office space, while the former hedges on the business purposes of the deal. Finanacial analysts, by and large, seemed to fall in the hedging camp.

Personally, I think the Yahoo! News analysis is much more right-on. Though the only firm detail of the deal was that Google would include a button for the Java Desktop in its Google Toolbar, there’s plenty enough to be read from that. I think that it points precisely in the direction this deal is headed - toward providing an online version of OpenOffice in the toolbar. The Java Desktop seems more of a throwaway placeholder than an item of substance.

With full XML support, OpenOffice has been quietly moving in the “online ready” direction for some time. The Google folks are more than proficient with XML, online and java technologies. And, they’ve hired away nearly the entire top echelon of OpenOffice developers in the past several months.

I’d actually expect to see an OpenOffice-based calendaring and contacts app as a companion to GMail fairly soon. That’s one glaring deficiency in comparison with rival Yahoo!’s online suite of personal management tools. Honestly, I’m surprised that GMail has been without this piece this long. But, perhaps the announced partnership with Sun and the hiring of OpenOffice developers explains the delay. This may have been the long-term strategy for that piece from the beginning. Technically, it would all seem to be a nice fit, too.

ZDNet seemingly scratched their collective coneheads at, “Google will somehow help promote and distribute OpenOffice” (my emphasis). Given Google’s ability to deliver online applications and Sun’s legacy dedication to networked computing, I don’t think there’s any question in the long term what that somehow will be. I’m sure that within the next 12-18 months, we’ll see a fully realized online version of OpenOffice delivered by Google.