Google-Sun News Conference Notes (Updated)

Well, the Google-Sun News Conference is over. I took a few notes of things that stood out to me, and, afterwards, wrote up some thoughts.

Notes

• Well, I missed the first couple minutes, due to my RealPlayer link. I connected a few minutes before 1:30, and it brought up a screen saying it would start soon, and started playing some "hold music." About 1:35 or so, I began thinking, "it should have started by now," so I stopped RealPlayer, and tried connecting again. After a few times of RealPlayer not wanting to find the link, I was finally able to reconnect, and they were already talking!
• Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) kind of looks like Gary Winston from Antitrust. "Bill who?"
• Someone asked about Microsoft/Office. What are Sun and Google after? "Revenue...users..."
• What about the Google OS? Google is "in the end user search business." Sun has a new version of Solarius.
• I'm having some connection problems.
• Someone from CNET is asking a question. Apparently, Google is talking to CNET again.
• I did not know that Google contributes to open source communities.
• A question about OpenOffice as a web service. Much beating around the bush. Maybe?
• A lot of questions relate to OpenOffice.
• The partnership seems to be mostly about distribution.
• Another question about Microsoft.
• Client server is "last-millenium" and Windows is the last remnant of the technology.

Thoughts

It seems like there wasn't a whole lot to the conference. Maybe I did miss something important at the beginning. They, of course, stepped around any questions relating to Microsoft, and were very ambiguous regarding suggestions about an OpenOffice web service. Google is going to be buying more Sun hardware, and Sun is going to be including an option to install the Google toolbar when users install the Java Runtime Environment. I hadn't heard much before about Google's apparently "broad" support of open source, but that is good news.

Overall, it wasn't too exciting. I'm curious as to what other bloggers have to say, and what will be written by the reporters who were actually there. It seems like Google and Sun scheduled the conference simply to say, "we're working together," and the rest of the Internet picked it up and ran with it. Free publicity can't be bad. Perhaps there will be more to see later. We will simply have to wait and see.

Update

And now there is a press release on Sun's site briefly covering the conference. You can read it here. Yes, that is basically all that was said at the conference.