Sun and Google vs. M$FT?

I can't wait to hear what Google and Sun are going to announce at this news conference. Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz posted in his blog a bunch of hints. For example he said: "If I were a betting man, I'd bet the world was about to change." And he talked about what had just happened in Massachusetts. He also said that in his last keynote he asked the audience if they'd rather give up their browser or their desktop and they "Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink."

In this article, Tim Bray says that OpenDocument will turn everything inside out.

So if I were a betting man, I'd say that Sun and Google are going to try to hurt their common enemy (Microsoft) by innovating around accessing Office-like functionality from the browser using open standards. This would probably leverage Open Office suite/expertise and Google's expertise in delivering rich-client/sophisticated/AJAX apps on thin clients at an acceptable and sometimes amazing performance.

So don't miss the new conference!

[Update] It turns out the deal seems to cover more aspects than I had anticipated. Sun also plans to distribute the Google Toolbar with Java and Google will buy lots more Sun servers. For more on this story/partnership check out this page.