Google-Sun Alliance: Big Bore or Big News? - Survey Says…
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A number of analysts were unimpressed by the announcement. Cherry Hill Research president Henry Blodget believes it was a “non-event.” Looking at the market, he observed that “Free or nearly free office suites have been available for years, and, on its face, today’s partnership will merely make one of them more available.” He thinks they are “likely to appeal to only a tiny segment of the office productivity market – mainly consumers working at home who don’t mind using a stripped down product – and no distribution deal is likely to change this.” Perhaps Blodget should speak with Peter Quinn, CIO of Massachusetts. He has mandated that, by January 1, 2007, state employees will have to save all documents in either OpenDocument or Portable Document File (PDF). This move to open source – and away from Microsoft Office -- by a state government in the U.S. is widely seen as a major blow to the software giant.
Industry analyst Rob Enderle also couldn’t see what the fuss was about. “There really isn’t much depth to this partnership. I think Eric is doing this as a favor for Scott. It provides a certain amount of press and visibility to Sun when there hasn’t been very many positive things going on at the company.” It is true that Sun needs this deal; it has lost $4.5 billion since June 2001. But the company had already been starting to show signs of recovery.
Perhaps the correct view about this agreement is that it is just the tip of the iceberg. Both of these companies are devoted to delivering things via a network. There isn’t a bigger network than the Internet. And the idea of saving your stuff somewhere other than your own computer is becoming more and more acceptable, with web-based email and digital photo albums and the like. If Sun and Google are set to make the desktop less important, that is going to hit Microsoft in an $11 billion a year breadbasket. How Microsoft will respond remains to be seen, but you can be certain it won’t take this lying down.
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