Several stories filed Monday suggest tomorrow’s Google-Sun press conference will unveil a new initiative aimed at Microsoft’s Office suite:
According to Susan Kuchinskas of Internetnews.com:
Google and Sun Microsystems [are] expected to announce a collaboration to bring StarOffice productivity applications to Google users. StarOffice is Sun’s suite of integrated word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database software based on the OpenOffice open source project.
The partnership with Sun seems to indicate that Google’s direction is to build out what is, in essence, an alternative to Microsoft Office. Google already offers e-mail, photo managing and instant messaging applications.
Google already offers Gmail users plenty of storage for their e-mail archives. If it extended that storage to other kinds of documents that were generated in conformance with the OpenDocument standard, and then combined that with a Web-based productivity suite to connect users to their stored information via any browser, the result would be a platform that could transform business collaboration as well as consumer communications.
ZDNet’s Stephen Shankland cites a Saturday blog entry by Sun President Jonathan Schwartz, which closes with:
But value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista. But in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, there’s a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser. Like Skype. Or QNext. Or Google Earth. And Java? OpenOffice and StarOffice?
If I were a betting man, I’d bet the world was about to change. And that what just happened in Massachusetts, when a state government made what was to me a very rational statement - we will pick an open standard to protect the right of our citizens to access data and services; we will then buy from vendors that support standards - will be a shot heard ‘round the world. [Note: see our earlier post on the MA decision for more.]
Kuchinskas sees another indicator of an OpenOffice-focused alliance:
Google’s dip into OpenOffice began with its hiring of Joerg Heilig, former director of software engineering at Sun, according to Gary Edwards, a consultant and designated representative of the OpenOffice.org open source community.
Shankland quotes Stephen Arnold, author of “The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software,” and Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady on the mutual benefits of a Google-Sun Alliance:
“Google could deploy a version of Google Office at any time. The reason they haven’t (is) they’re not set up to serve enterprises with all the security and name recognition that Sun has,” said [Arnold]. “That’s a very obvious plus for Google.”
And Google has mammoth distribution power, O’Grady said. “Google has the ability to get into exponentially more places than does OpenOffice,” he said, including places that “may never have heard of (OpenOffice.org) in the first place.”
And, notes Shankland, there already are close ties between the two companies:
Google CEO Schmidt was Sun’s chief technology officer in the 1990s; John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, is on the board of both companies; and Andy Bechtolsheim, a Sun co-founder who returned to the company to launch its Galaxy servers, wrote a check for $100,000 that helped get Google started.
In addition, Google is an active Java user. Since 2004, it has been a member of the Java Community Process steering committee that governs the fate of the technology. Though Java hasn’t caught on widely for running desktop software, it has long had the potential to undermine Microsoft’s strength by providing an alternative program foundation to Windows.
Mitch Shapiro at 11:40 PM|Comments(0)
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