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.
Talk about lackluster!?!?!
I was hoping that google opened it’s checkbook and just bought out Sun to create an inroads to corporate computing.
I think there is definitely more going on. I can’t see the CEOs of 2 large companies wasting time just to announce the bundling of google toolbar and java for downloads from each other’s sites. I still think the web version of Sun’s office suite will be coming soon. Maybe they ran into some issues at the last minute.
and just to think that i was going to download the Real player to hear this ‘momentus’ announcement.
Its bloody damp squid… and a warning for us not to generate too much hype/chatter.. there is a risk of creating a new bubble…
and getting all AJAX’ed up.
Commone sense tells us that we don’t need another bloated office suite… otherwise we would have been using it…
— and who of all the people that made this speculation actually were using it?
very few.
those remarks on the previous comment do seem a bit harsh… ive yet to find an applet that requires an update JRE… or indeed a need for the JRE.
still may be an opportunity to use a lot of low commodity Intel boxes running Solaris on them. — ouch IBM!
To Suresh re his Intel comment–make that AMD. The boxes they were touting at the announcement, which Andy Bechtolsheim has been laboring over for a long time, are entirely based on AMD’s Opteron.
Frankly I see more than meets the eye here myself. this was not a meaningless get-together.
HAR, HAR, HAR. All you could see at the webcast was Jonathan and Schmidt backslapping each other. Hopefully, further press conferences/announcements by Google will not be such damp squibs lacking any substantial developments. Not sure what to make of this meeting.
This gave me the deja vu feeling of the Indian pakistan meetings.. “We had a positive meeting to talk about further meetings”. If you _had_ to just talk to each other, why not do it silently in the boardroom? Too claustrophobic in there these days? Open Office needs a lot of work to compete effectively with Microsoft Office. Just adding google’s distribution clout to open office won’t do it. After all, open office is available freely.
Hopefully, this is not a trend for future forthcomings from google.
Suresh,
“Commone sense tells us that we don’t need another bloated office suite… otherwise we would have been using it…
– and who of all the people that made this speculation actually were using it?
”
You’re right we don’t need another bloated office suite and for most people it’s not worth it to pay $250-400 for the latest Office. A cheap hosted office suite would be a much better solution for individuals who want those tools for personal use and for schools. I would rather use a web app that’s supported thru advertising or pay a small fee for an ad-free version of Office for my personal use. Most businesses will not use this type of product though.
Probably google playing games with Microsoft. Does MS make meaningless PR’s? Maybe like continuously announcing product upgrade delays.
Poor taste, IMO.
My guess is that this is just a simple Google Toolbar distribution deal. Google is paying Sun, probably lots of money, to bundle toolbars because toolbars drive lots of searches and ad revenue. Java, Open Office (and the press conference) were just thrown in to make it look like more of a partnership for Sun.
At 20 million Java runtime downloads a month it’s a pretty good distribution channel for Google Toolbar. Of course if any other company had done this deal, people would be focused on how evil it is to bundle apps you didn’t ask for with unrelated downloads. When Google does it it’s some kind of strategic masterstroke.
me tells you what.
google wants to continue making “hype” in the press, since they are running out of any “real” product announcements. All they can do now is announce some BS partnerships with companies that fail to deliver, build yet another wireless network that aims to provide nothing but spending avenue..
All in all, google has release some nice fancy web products that don’t make any fiscal sense currently and are probably going to run out of steam. $7 billion will buy nothin but Siebel as we learnt recently and that did not flutter Orcl’s stock.
Also, everyone is rich and fat at Goog now, and fat orgs don’t run fast and think slow…it’s showing!!!!
thelaggard also posted some thoughts regarding the Google / Sun Collaboration announcement earlier today:
http://thelaggard.blogs.com/thelaggard/2005/10/joke_of_the_day.html
what a circle jerk that was. “Hey we will crosslink each others downloadable software. Sweet.” Hey Google. Instead of wasting your time with this kind of crap why not spend some of that “20%” getting your crap out of beta?
Toolbars may not sound sexy to many of you guys but they drive a lot of searches and it will be one of Google’s biggest defence if MS begin to tightly integrate search into the desktop…As one of the previous poster said with 20 million downloads Sun will be a new powerful distribution channel.
About 78 million individual users visit Google sites each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings , so imagine how much new users will 20 million toolbar donwloads per month will bring to google!
How successful has the sidebar been? How successful has the desktop search been?
Don’t they all go away with Vista?
What’s the big deal? Google and Sun work together. Officially. Microsoft is the target. Period.
Scott McNealy:
“We are going after revenue, growth, profits, customers…We are going afer the community…”
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2005/10/google-sun-network-is-computer.html
I think this is just a beginning for a long haul of Office Suite Development. Since they would be working so closely with each other, they din’t want people to speculate on their future offerings. This way they are opening the gates to each others engineers to work on a major Industry shattering Service-like, Office Suite, without getting much press.
evryone is missing the point:
google saved NASA, now they want to save the SUN, next they will come down to buying EARTHlink, after that maybe come closer to home and save BUSH, as in GWB…
Maybe they will merge.
Create a company called SUoggle. Then will be bought by Oracle that can add a AJAX-injected Office Suite into their offerings..
So we would have a company Called OrOOGle which could then sell a database driven Ajax-infused office suite as a streroid infused front end to all their CRM/SRM applications (Siebel + PeopleSoft).
They can also then give everything away for free over the GoogleNet and then makes billions in profits from the “Thank You” notes from the people of SFO that they can sell on eBay..oops..shouldn’t ebay be in the mix too??
I can’t even smirk at this bubble…..
Does this sound vaguely familiar to anyone?
When Sun first came out with Java, Corel immediately jumped on the bandwagon and embraced the new programming language like they wanted to be the first in line for the Second Coming. Corel spent months of work and millions of dollars trying to create an Office-like environment that would be cross-platform. Both Sun’s and Corel’s stock shot up, and media pundits predicted a showdown between Goliath and the two Davids.
Problem was, Java wasn’t nearly powerful or compact enough back then to get the job done right. The whole thing fizzled out and Corel made yet another right turn to focus on something else. (Like going bankrupt…)
Sun should have “challenge Microsoft to the ultimate showdown” in its Mission Statement. And now that Google is getting big enough to take up some space on the block too, it’s inevitable that Microsoft and Google will start to get in each other’s way. Microsoft has dozens of KO’s under its championship belt while Google may be the baby in “Honey I Blew Up the Kids” — lots of size, but not too wise in the ways of the world. If someone is going to collapse, sadly I think it will be Google.
Love to see something come out to at least rival Office, but if history is any indicator (and it usually is) Microsoft will come out of any “challenge” unscathed.
Hmmm… checking the records… Google owns 3,775 licenses for MS Office 2003 Professional.