An agreement to promote and help with the research and development of each other's software products sounds like pretty standard fare, but this agreement comes from Google and Sun. Does that make a difference? Maybe not given the initial steps revealed in the press conference, but down the road, there is some serious potential to shake things up in Redmond.
When a news analyst is heard to say (as did Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio) “What if two of the industry’s biggest luminaries decided to hold a press conference and everybody came, but there was no news?” you have to wonder what they were expecting. In the case of the recently-announced alliance between Sun and Google, the answer is pretty clear, since many were speculating in advance of the event. A Google-branded office software suite that will run online – and incidentally throw Microsoft for a loop – was a favorite prediction among those who make it their job to figure these things out in advance.
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president and COO, certainly did nothing to discourage the excitement in the blog entry he wrote leading up to the event. He talked about the old model of buying software 20 years ago, where you paid for everything in advance. “But now how do you ‘buy’ software? You go to yahoo.com, or java.sun.com, or opentable.com, and you use what they offer – for free. Software as a service has…fundamentally changed the business model.” He went on to talk about the different shape of desktop applications now, coming “in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, there’s a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser…If I were a betting man, I’d bet the world was about to change.”
So what did Google and Sun actually announce when it came time for the press conference at the Computer History Museum? Was it earth-shattering, or at least Microsoft-shattering? Um, not quite. The two companies unveiled an agreement to promote and distribute their technology to users. What does this mean specifically? Well, for starters, within 30 days, Sun will begin distributing the Google Toolbar with its Java software when users download the latter from Sun’s website. Since Java software is downloaded 20 million times per month (according to Sun CEO Scott McNealy), that’s nothing to sneeze at – but is it really worthy of a press conference?
Oh, yes, there’s also the little matter of Google buying Sun hardware, which will give a boost to Sun’s bottom line – not just from Google’s purchases, of course. Others will take their cue from Google and its huge datacenter (and Google’s reliability requirements) and be encouraged to buy what Sun has to offer. But again, that’s hardly worth a press conference, especially since Google didn’t say exactly what it was going to purchase from Sun. Again, that’s hardly worth a press conference.
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