What I'm Doing

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Google-Sun Alliance?

According to recent news, Google and Sun may be joining forces. Sun's website mentions a live webcast at 10:30am PT (1:30pm ET) where they will "discuss joint activities".

Rumors are already circulating as to what, exactly, this means, largely fueled by a recent blog entry by Jonathan Schwartz, the President of Sun, on software distribution. The most often quoted portion of the entry that I've seen is:

But value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista. But in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, 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?

If I were a betting man, I'd bet the world was about to change.

The most widely circulated rumor seems to involve some sort of Google Office (based on Sun's StarOffice) or, at least, something similar to Microsoft's Outlook that exists online. The office idea is interesting, but the idea of an online Outlook is exciting; I mentioned back on my Xanga blog a while ago that I'd really like a "GCalendar" that would be stored online, would allow you to make entries public or private, and could possibly sync with Outlook and/or Mozilla Sunbird.

These ideas, however, bring up some issues. How much data—especially more personal data like calendar appointments—are people willing to expose to the Internet via Google? How much trust does Google have that they can protect people's data, or that they will maintain their "do no evil" motto?

Todd, on the Geek News Central podcast, says that "Google has basically declared war on Microsoft." That'd be nice, really, but if Google has really declared war on M$, why don't they have Linux versions for more of their downloaded software? Perhaps, given much of it comes from companies Google acquired, they're working on it?

Or, maybe Google really is working toward a Google OS, as some have speculated. Regardless, it will be interesting to see what comes of this. Check it out at 1:30pm ET. I plan to.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Qnext is really fantastic and it is absolutely free!!!
Qnext will be upgrade soon,so you can run this incredible software product.

Anonymous said...

Qnext announced version 3 of its media sharing P2Web software on 01.03.2007!

Qnext is a software package, written in Java, that generates a Webcast to deliver streamed music, shared photos, and files to selected recipients in real-time. Instead of resizing photos and e-mailing them, the Qnext user can simply drop full size photos into a folder and send a link to the recipient who can browse them in a Web Browser. The streaming of music to a small number of selected recipients is Fair Use. The application also supports audio, video chat with a tagboard. Qnext software for Macintosh as well as Windows and Linux is free.

Free Download Qnext