Google and Sun - Is that all?

Last week, an enormous buzz was generated when the press found out that Sun and Google were going to have a joint press conference. There was a lot of speculation before the announcement, and most people settled on the idea of a Google Office being announced. (Sun is behind the wonderfully successful OpenOffice.org.) What they actually announced was cross promotion of each others products. Google would promote Java and Sun would promote the Google toolbar.

What? Is that it? They did mention future collaboration on stuff, but nothing concrete. Needless to say, the press (and Google/Sun fans) were disappointed. It seemed like a letdown to almost everyone involved.

Afterwards, a lot of people asked does a Google Office even make sense. In my opinion, it does. Google's goal has been to make information more easily available to its customers. Google Search, Froogle, Maps, etc. all make it easier for you and me to get the information that we need. One problem that I run into personally is that I don't have the files I need when I need them. If Google had an office suite that could save to a Google server or even an online Office suite, I could access my data anywhwere.

Of course, the biggest problem would be how would Google make money from this. As we see in their other services, they like customizing ads to fit their customer. For example, in Gmail, you get an ad for hotels in Florida if you send an email about Disney World. They could do the same for your office documents and make money that way. But there is a problem with that idea. A lot of people raised privacy concerns over the GMail ads and would like do so about Google scanning your documents for the same purpose.

This is going to be a touchy subject. Of course, we don't know if Google is even interested in the idea. If they do release such a product, I would at least be interested in trying it out. It would be great to use the 2.5+ Gigs of storage in my Gmail account for storage of my documents. Not only would they be available anywhere, I'm betting Google does a better job of backing up than I do!