IP Democracy: Different Views on Sun-Google Announcement

The Sun-Google announcement certainly wasn’t as big or clear as many had speculated, so its not too surprising that views on its significance were pretty varied (here’s a video of the press conference):

Here’s Om Malik’s take:

The Google-Sun announcement in the end turned out to be nothing…. or as someone just said on the IM. “Let’s do something useless so we can say we did something so Sun can get some press because we’re dying slowly…” Harsh but true, given all the speculation, which was nothing more than chatter of the worst kind. All of us are looking for shapes in shadows, including me… sigh! call me slow, but I am not sure how AP is coming up with the Open Office conclusion with this JRE announcement.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li acknowledges that “After all of the hype over the past day, the actual announcement between Sun and Google was pretty subdued.” But she still saw some things of substance:

First, JRT is used in many consumer applications, especially in music and entertainment. The fact that Windows does not ship with JRT means that each time consumers try to initiate an application that uses Java, it checks to make sure that it has the latest version. If not, the app directs the user to java.com for the download. Voila! You’ll get Google Toolbar as one of the things to download. And we understand that the Toolbar download will be “opt-out” meaning that the default will be to download Toolbar and that users have to take decline the download…

…Second, is the “explore” option of attaching Toolbar to OpenOffice. John and I suspect that the reason they didn’t come right out and say that Toolbar would also be downloaded with OpenOffice is because they haven’t reached an agreement yet on how much Google should be paying Sun - or vice versa…

…Third, there’s an unspoken opportunity here for Sun’s core business - selling hardware. Google has built thousands of its own servers and is one of the biggest users of Linux. We believe that at some point, Google will be under pressure to finally outsource that server manufacturing to someone like Sun…

…Lastly, you gotta wonder about the possibilities of the largest search engine teaming up with the largest proponent of open source. Google is eager to offer non-Windows non-Microsoft Office options that it can be a part of, while Sun needs that strong, consumer distribution to move the open source revolution out of the enterprise.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on October 4, 2005 4:13 PM to IP Democracy