The Google and Sun alliance

Google and Sun appear to be new best friends, working on a collaborative effort that could elevate the profile of the OpenOffice.org and Java software packages. Details are awaiting announcement from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun CEO Scott McNealy, but the plan certainly seems to be to shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into Google's. Not an easy task, not at all. However, working together, the two companies might just have enough clout to do it, given that Sun has the open-source OpenOffice.org software suite and also has Java. Google, meanwhile, has a growing suite of software and services, including quite possibly the best search engine for the internet in the world, in addition to the inclination to move to being a company that supplies network-based applications.

One area that this might lead to is the provision of a Google office applications suite, in a direct challenge to the market supremacy of Microsoft Office.

"Google could deploy a version of Google Office at any time. The reason they haven't (is) they're not set up to serve enterprises with all the security and name recognition that Sun has," said Stephen Arnold, author of "The Google Legacy: How Google's Internet Search is Transforming Application Software." "That's a very obvious plus for Google," he said.