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This week, Google and Sun announced a new collaboration. No surprise there, it only makes sense for them to work together.
Where the interesting potential for this deal lies is with the portion that was not announced; StarOffice / OpenOffice and Google’s considerable talents for making web based applications come alive.
Today, Sun’s OpenOffice offering is not very impressive. I’ve tried using it a few times up until a year or two ago, but always gave up in frustration. While it works, but usually time it doesn’t send documents back and forth with Microsoft Office very well, or when it does share them, they come through corrupted.
That said, Google is perfectly positioned to take this software, and ‘googlize’ it. i.e. turn it into a world class tool. Will it affect Microsoft? Yes. But is it a Microsoft killer? No.
In this battle one could argue that either company’s killer strategy isn’t actually an application at all. Let’s take it a step back and use a political analogy to compare what’s going on in this battle and what occured during the Cold War.
Yes, you read right The Cold War.