Tim O'Reilly

Sun and Google to cooperate on Google Office?

by @timoreilly  | +Tim O'Reilly  | Comments: 5 4 October 2005

From Search Engine Journal (via Dave Farber's IP list):

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.

Comments: 5

Ryan Guill [ 4 October 2005 10:18 AM]

If you have realplayer, you can watch a live webcast from here: http://wcdata.sun.com/webcast/archives/VIP-2166/

The feed has started...

Ryan Guill [ 4 October 2005 10:19 AM]

If you have realplayer, you can watch a live webcast from here: http://wcdata.sun.com/webcast/archives/VIP-2166/

The feed has started...

Anonymous [ 4 October 2005 10:34 AM]

I can't access it. What does it say?

Serge [ 4 October 2005 11:26 AM]

Thank you for the info. Was fun to be online from Paris

Keith Erskine [ 4 October 2005 11:58 AM]

Just watched the announcement. I got the feeling that Sun and Google are still in discussions on deals - both hardware and software. They probably put a stake in the ground for an announcement, thinking that they'd be farther along.