Google and Sun get together for desktop apps

Sun Microsystems and Google plan to announce a collaborative effort that some analysts speculate could elevate the profile of the OpenOffice.org and Java software packages.

Details won't emerge publicly until Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun CEO Scott McNealy - both featured on this year's silicon.com Agenda Setters list - take the stage on Tuesday at a news conference in Mountain View, California. But one strong possibility is a partnership that could help shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into Google's.

The partners have complementary assets for such a task. Sun has the open source OpenOffice.org software suite and its close relative, StarOffice. It has Java software, which is well suited for network-friendly applications that run on any Java-enabled PC.

As for Google, its products have become daily resources for a vast number of computer users, and it offers a growing suite of software. In addition, it has the ambition of becoming the company that supplies network-based applications.

One person who was possibly an influence on the change is Joerg Heilig, who for years was director of engineering for StarOffice at Sun but who is now apparently a Google employee. Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady said he had heard Heilig had been hired by the search company, and Google's voicemail system includes an employee with that full name.

A hint about the upcoming announcement might lie in Sun president Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry about software distribution, posted on Saturday. In recent years, the power of software provision shifted toward Microsoft and away from companies that distribute software, whether through stores or directly to customers, he wrote.

Schwartz wrote: "You used what came bundled into Windows and got a new slug of functionality each time you upgraded. It was a good gig."

Now the shift has gone further, as the internet has allowed companies "to bypass Microsoft's legendary distribution power", he wrote, specifically mentioning Google as an example.

"Value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista," he wrote. "There's a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser. Like Skype. Or QNext. Or Google Earth. And Java? OpenOffice and StarOffice?"

Google already has a significant collection of software that is dependent on a network rather than being tied to an operating system - including Gmail for email; the Desktop Search Sidebar (which offers customised news and information based on a computer users' activity); Picasa for photo management; and Google Earth for satellite-based maps and geographic information.

A partnership with Sun that provided an office applications suite would round out that list - and dramatically increase the competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Office suite dominates the market for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software.

Stephen Arnold, author of The Google Legacy: How Google's Internet Search is Transforming Application Software said: "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. That's a very obvious plus for Google."

And Google has mammoth distribution power, O'Grady said. "Google has the ability to get into exponentially more places than does OpenOffice," he said, including places that "may never have heard of [OpenOffice.org] in the first place".

Microsoft counts Office as a major revenue source and continues to develop the product. A beta version of the upcoming Office 12 is due in November. Although the new version has some server-centric features, the product is still fundamentally a PC-based application suite.

Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com