Sun has agreed to distribute Google Toolbar as an optional add-on when people download the Java Runtime Environment from java.com, and the two companies will look at opportunities to promote OpenOffice. Everything else is speculation, and speculation that Sun boss Scott McNealy seemed particularly keen to promote.
The announcement that Google and Sun are buddies is not insignificant, however. Longer term, indications are that the companies will collaborate on some kind of platform play. That’s what they want us to think, anyway, and it’s evidently what we want to believe.
Somehow, somewhere, the media has got it into its head that Google is a whisker from blowing away Microsoft’s operating system monopoly, and no amount of announcing trivial software distro deals is going to dilute that consensus.
Even though Sun will distribute the toolbar, it is telling that this part of the arrangement is not quid pro quo. Google boss Eric Schmidt admitted that it would make sense for Google to distribute Sun’s technology, the JRE maybe, but the company will not.
Sun appears to be exhibiting the same kind of mentality as some of Google’s print advertisers, which believe that being associated with the Google brand, even just as an advertiser, is good for business, and are willing to pay for the privilege.
McNealy spun it the other way, stating that JRE can do for the Google Toolbar what Netscape did for the Java runtime. He also said that he expects tens of millions of additional Toolbar downloads from the Sun deal.
As unexpectedly dull as much of the news was, it is the potential future developments that Google getting into bed with Sun could produce that are gathering all the interest.
The companies’ promise to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun offerings such as the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org project gives the best indicator of where they could be headed in the medium term.
No specifics were given, and suggestions that Google may make a hosted Web services version of OpenOffice available, maybe using the Ajax application development technique, were not directly addressed. That notion was probably a long shot, given Google doesn’t even natively support OpenOffice’s OpenDocument Format in its Google Desktop search application.
The two companies do appear to be aligned on the future of computing. That is to say, Mr McNealy and Sun president Jonathan Schwartz rolled out their time-tested network is the computer theories, and Mr Schmidt was sitting on the same stage not disagreeing.
The implications of this approach, unlikely as they still seem, were clear – Microsoft better watch out because in future we’re not going to need its software. Applications are all going to be hosted and thin-client and bandwidth will be so cheap it won’t matter.
