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October 3, 2005 4:52 PM PDT
Google, Sun plan partnership
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Details won't emerge publicly until Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun CEO Scott McNealy take the stage on Tuesday at a news conference in Mountain View, Calif. But one strong possibility is a partnership that could help shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into Google's.
The partners have complementary assets for such a task. Sun has the open-source OpenOffice.org software suite and its close relative, StarOffice. It has Java software, which is well suited for network-friendly applications that run on any Java-enabled PC.
As for Google, its products have become daily resources for a vast number of computer users, and it offers a growing suite of software. In addition, it has the ambition of becoming the company that supplies network-based applications.
What's new:
Google and Sun plan to announce a collaborative effort on Tuesday that analysts speculate could elevate the profile of the OpenOffice.org and Java software packages.
Bottom line:
One strong possibility is a partnership that could help shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into Google's.
One person who was possibly an influence on the change is Joerg Heilig, who for years was director of engineering for StarOffice at Sun, but who now apparently is a Google employee. Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady said he had heard Heilig had been hired by the search company, and Google's voice mail system includes an employee with that full name.
A hint about the upcoming announcement might lie in Sun President Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry about software distribution, posted Saturday. In recent years, the power of software provision shifted toward Microsoft and away from companies that distribute software, whether through stores or directly to customers, he wrote.
"You used what came bundled into Windows and got a new slug of functionality each time you upgraded. It was a good gig," Schwartz wrote.
Now the shift has gone further, as the Internet has allowed companies "to bypass Microsoft's legendary distribution power," he wrote, specifically mentioning Google as an example.
"Value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista," he wrote. "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?"
Google already has a significant collection of software that is dependent on a network rather than being tied to an operating system. They include Gmail for e-mail, the Desktop Search Sidebar (which offers customized news and information based on a computer users's activity), Picasa for photo management and Google Earth for satellite-based maps and geographic information.
A partnership with Sun that provided an office applications suite would round out that list--and dramatically increase the competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Office suite dominates the market for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software.
"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 Stephen Arnold, author of "The Google Legacy: How Google's Internet Search is Transforming Application Software." "That's a very obvious plus for Google," he said.
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."
Microsoft counts Office as a major revenue source and continues to develop the product. A beta version of the upcoming Office 12 is due in November. Although the new version has some server-centric features, the product is still fundamentally a PC-based application suite.
Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
There already are close ties between the two companies, observed Caris & Co. analyst Mark Stahlman, who in the early 1990s heard talk at Sun about building the kind of network services that Google now is providing. Among the ties: 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
See more CNET content tagged:
Java software,
OpenOffice.org,
StarOffice,
Sun Microsystems Inc.,
Google Inc.
Google has already given us some pretty impressive stuff. But how much of that stuff have *YOU* personally paid for, other than eyballing some ads. Sound familiar? Sounds like a replay of the dot com bust, to me.
Google has to move itself to the next level and it has to do it soon. Maybe Sun has something to offer that would enable Google to do that. One thing Google has is an amazing adoption rate. They put something out there, it's got limited functionality, they call it beta, and eveybody starts using it right away because it's already better than anything anyone currently has. That's exactly the kind of influence that could really cut a leg out from under MS Office, and even Windows very quickly.
stock now cuz it's going to be a good investment again.
stock now cuz it's going to be a good investment again.
planning to create a free online desktop with
office email and all the bits fully integrated,
secure and networked. That already exists at
http:www.cosmopod.com
planning to create a free online desktop with
office email and all the bits fully integrated,
secure and networked. That already exists at
http://www.cosmopod.com
solution a few weeks ago. Should I sue Google for reading my
imagination?
solution a few weeks ago. Should I sue Google for reading my
imagination?
- Re: Sun-Google
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by jgodse
October 5, 2005 11:10 AM PDT
- This is a great partnership!
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Reply to this comment
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See all 21 Comments >>Google needs to get into the enterprise with the Google Mini (or enterprise search) before Microsoft does it with future releases. The best way to do this is to leverage Sun's distribution network and bundle the mini with Sun servers. This enables Sun to offer more functionality for not much more money (thus helping their primary business of selling servers), and Google gets their tentacles into the enterprise by providing "mini" functionality for free. Once in the enterprise, the free Google desktop can now hook in to the google index of the enterprise data, and people can search enterprise data at the same speed with which they can search internet data.
The next part of the strategy allows the "Google Mini" cache to also cache the Google-Sun OpenDocuments inside the enterprise, giving almost the same effect as storing them on an enterprise-connected computer. It is win-win-win-win for Google, Sun, the enterprise, and the end user.
Cheers, Jay