Google and Sun Microsystems Planning Major Announcement : GoogleOffice?
Sun Microsystems and Google are planning a major news conference on Tuesday, October 4th (today) at 10:30 a.m. PT/1:30 p.m. ET. The conference will be held by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO and Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman of the Executive Committee and CEO. Sun Microsystems announced that McNealy and Schmidt will be discussing a new collaborative effort between the two companies. Yes, that sound you just heard was Microsoft cringing at the thought of Google and Sun working together.
Various analysts and geek gossipers are predicting that the partnership will be centered around Sun’s OpenOffice, an open source office suite with alternative versions of Excel, Word, Powerpoint and other “MicrosoftOffice-esque” type offerings and StarOffice, a Sun project related to OpenOffice. To further escalate the rumors, Joerg Heilig, the former Director of Engineering for StarOffice, is now a Google employee.
Google’s recent projects have brought their search and information services out of the web browser and to the desktop, Google Desktop Search, Google Talk and Google Sidebar, and one of the major goals of Google seems to be bringing their services into the realm of everyday personal computing and not just web search offerings. With the launch of a Google Office Suite, powered by Sun and tweaked by Google, Google would be able to challenge Microsoft instantly with Google’s power of distribution and name recognition. Something that other offerings, even Sun, may not be able to accomplish. Of course there is always the possibility of Google and Sun working together to offer a new Google branded operating system, including a browser, office suite, communications tools and other offerings… but such an announcement could be too much at one time.
Anywho, the Sun and Google conference will be available to watch via live webcast on Tuesday and before spending the next three hours specualting on what Google and Sun could be planning, we’ll wait and report the real news later this afternoon.
