Sun and Google today announced an agreement to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun’s Java Runtime Environment, the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth. More here.
I thought that there was going to be some earth shattering news but this is nothing more than Sun’s going to distribute Google Toolbar – like as if I couldn’t get it myself?
Comeon guys, let’s see Google Toolbar for Solaris and Linux, lets see google chat/voip for the *NIX platforms.
More importantly, I need google earth on Solaris and Linux.
Comeon guys, let’s see Google Toolbar for Solaris and Linux, lets see google chat/voip for the *NIX platforms.
More importantly, I need google earth on Solaris and Linux.
I’m watching the announcement live now, and I must say that this deal is rather… Vague. Erik of Google is very vague (as Google always is), Scot says a lot but, well, not with much content.
The Q&A sesssion I’m currently watching is much more interesting. However, I really cannot say if all this means that Google’s apps are going to run on Linux/Solaris. Vagueness is the keyword here. When someone asked if all this was to replace Windows/MS Office, we got a brrage of buzzwords. When someone else asked to Erik of Google if they are working on an OS, he didn’t say ‘no’, but instead he pointed to Scott and Jonathan Schwarz saying thet they’re the OS guys.
Someone else asked if all this would mean that OO.o would turn into a webservice– the short term answer was ‘no’, but Erik did say that in the future we might see office apps move to that direction.
The Google Toolbar is already availible for firefox on windows and linux, and maybe even solaris.
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/index.html
As for Google Talk, you can IM but not use voice. We’ll see, they may expand later on. But likely not for solaris anytime soon. Solaris is hardly worth developing Google Talk for, it’s not a desktop OS (yet).
http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html
I think if they come out with GTalk for other platforms, it’ll be on Mac and MAYBE Linux. Let’s face it, most Linux users would rather use a standardized system. Argue about the merits all you want, but that’s what the majority will do.
Google Talk is basically Jabber with voice, extra authentication, and a Google brand and server, anyway. Google hasn’t done anything to undermine Mac and Linux usage; Notifier’s out for mac, and they published Jabber client instructions.
Yahoo and Google Toolbars for Firefox work perfectly on Mac, Linux, and BeOS.
It looks like they are formally announcing a partnership, where they want to get google/sun technology out to as many user’s as possible. They may have hinted that there is more in the pipeline, but they are not willing to discuss it today.
a key thing that jonathon said was “leverage each other’s distribution mechanisms”.
Yea…O.K. Give it up dude.
will this mean more applets? maybe some from google?
i think yes, if enough people opt for the jre download
will this reinvigorate the market for applets?
anyone else i would say no, but google has incredible cred these days
are applets viable?
maybe, arguably they were ahead of their time in the 90s
will people prefer xul/ajax/xaml so as to keep everything in the DOM?
who knows, there are good args for keeping everything in the DOM, but JS is a terrible language and many people will balk at writing large apps in this fashion, also given the state limitations of http
will this mean more applets? maybe some from google?
No, applets have been dead for a long time.
i think yes, if enough people opt for the jre download
Java is dead on the client
will this reinvigorate the market for applets?
Of course not
anyone else i would say no, but google has incredible cred these days
Google doesn’t care about java in the browser. Sun is just very clingy and desperate to be seen as a “technology partner” with google so comes up with idiotic shit like distributing toolbar with the JRE
are applets viable?
Not when Sun implements them
will people prefer xul/ajax/xaml so as to keep everything in the DOM?
Obviously.
who knows, there are good args for keeping everything in the DOM, but JS is a terrible language and many people will balk at writing large apps in this fashion, also given the state limitations of http
Obviously, the alternative, Java, is worse, or it wouldn’t have died on the client.
would just like to point out, you see applets quite a bit on intranets, just not on the websites joe user visits, those have mostly been pushed aside for flash.
and as for java on the client, expect to see alot more. dotnet will lower peoples expectations for responsiveness and small memory footprints, and it has obviously given sun the kick in the pants it needs for its gui stuff. as swing gets better (which it is currently, at an exponential rate), expect to see more and more java on the client.
will this mean more applets? maybe some from google?
My guess is that they will start moving their desktop software to java.
will this reinvigorate the market for applets?
I doubt it. There are very little that applets are used for that flash cant do better. The only place you really see applets nowadays is in corporate intranet type apps.
are applets viable?
applets are awsome technology, but with a very limited scope in the real world.
will people prefer xul/ajax/xaml so as to keep everything in the DOM?
different tools for different problems.
who knows, there are good args for keeping everything in the DOM, but JS is a terrible language and many people will balk at writing large apps in this fashion, also given the state limitations of http
Javascript is a phenomenal language that is very rarely written properly. The two big problems with javascript is the warped microsoft implementation, and the fact that its so loose that you can be real sloppy and itll still work.
and remember, people have been writing large webapps long before the AJAX craze, let alone XAML. the limitations of http is a marketing ploy to push avalon, nothing more. the next generation (XAML from ms, and the more standards based XUL/JS/SVG/Canvas) will give us a more elegent way to tackle certain things, which is currently covered more by flash then by DHTML/AJAX.
hahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Fake out! I love being on this side of the fence. Winblows will have it day, don’t worry.
This is it? An option for google tool bar with installation of the JRE?
That is just so pathetic and hilarious.
spreading Sun’s Java Runtime Environment…
spreading the disease…
but OOo and Google integration would be cool: search for relevant info from within OOo (like MS Research)
What is wrong with Sun’s JRE? it is the best available, and very robust. i believe you are just trolling.
I do think like the parent poster, so I’ll answer you. Your question is invalid, your description is correct. JRE is stable and robust (well, up to some point that RE should be at least)
What is wrong with Sun’s JRE? it is the best available, and very robust. i believe you are just trolling.
With JRE? Nothing. In fact it works vey nice when typical desktop app is being runned on it. If only people would leave Java on desktop and away from heavy load stuff.
With people coding for JRE? A lot. Some people code heavy load server stuff to be runned on JRE. Sloppy memory, heavy load, server? Well, this is a perfect way to oblivion. There are a lot of perfect ways of JRE usage, but whenever I hear Apache Tomcat, etc… I don’t want to even think about it (Having such problems once in my life was enough). The only problem is that Java is not a universal tool for all purposes, but some people don’t understand that.
And since there is a lot of cases where Java usage is completely wrong (and that is the only reason WHY) there is a lot of people that think like me and many others. As soon as I hear something being done with Java, I step away and don’t install. Just too many bad experiences with anything being Java made. Every now and then I try some Java apps, just to see that they aren’t any better (less resource hungry).
p.s. Same goes for .Net engine.
well, from my point of view, Java, especially the Java 5 is pretty good for server application under heavy load. They are easier to scale too. At least you dont deal with crap load of security or coding issues (buffer owerflows, memory leaks) and it is much faster then scripting alternatives. Tomcat is also doing great if you ask me (5.5.x is particularly good). and note that tomcat is not the only choice.. Resin, Jetty, Orion and of course if you really want App servers they are used in heavy load enterprise sites without a problem.
Read this articles for a change if you want.
Story of wallmart.com’s Java-5 transition
http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=MigratingtoJava…
A google engineer and Java talk:
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/google/limoore…
Become.com, A Massively Scaled Java Technology Application
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/WebServices/become/
You see choices, I see security holes, and I already have enough to deal with in the JRE alone, holes that Sun simply sweeps under the rug and ignores, or passes it off as not their problem (“hey, it’s not our fault com.sun.blah has a huge gaping hole since jre 1.1”) . Pile on sloppy coding, inefficient resource utilization, disregard to users and other developers, fad and buzzword chasing, magic-framework-will-solve-all-problems, overhyped pointless frameworks equivalent to 4 lines of code and you’ll see why most devs would rather ditch java as soon as possible. On the other hand, it you’re a consultant type, you’ll probably love Java the crap creates an invisible dependency on your services; the real hidden cost and vendor lock-in.
Java could benefit from a good kick in the head and massive overhaul.
“A Massively Scaled Java Technology Application” Holy useless buzzwords, Batman! My toilet is connected to a “Massively Scaled Pipe Technology Network”. It’s also full of shit.
RE: Don’t forget Tarantella
People seem to be forgetting than Sun has got pretty impressive cache of technologies for remote delivery of applications over the network/web. Don’t forget that Sun bought Tarantella
Which all sounds and works great in theory and marketing-speak, but simply doesn’t deliver in practise. These things always miss out critical items which render them unusable and overpriced except for a very small niche. Incidently, their “impressive cache of technologies” happens to be nothing everyone else doesn’t already have, or has easy access to.
If there’s anything everyone should at least take away from today’s announcement if you hadn’t got it before, is that Sun is all hype, all marketing, no substance.
you talk useless FUD i gave you real life exapmples. what can i say more. troll.
If by disease you mean one of the most secure development environments, I’ll take it any day. When you spend hours and hours digging for buffer overruns and/or other arbitrary-memory-modification problems which plague native development environments, Java being disease. is akin to comparing common cold and ebola; ebola being the real diseases, memory related vulnerabilities.
Sun agreed to include Google’s toolbar in the JRE download in exchange from some free We-Like-Google press.
World changing, indeed.
(sarcasm)Propagation of the Google toolbar wow! earth shattering. These guys are going to take over the world! (/sarcasm)
…where Sun benefits from any of this. For that matter, how does Google benefit from any of this? Its not like any of us were waiting with abated breath for the JVM download to bundle an annoying toolbar. As Sun and Google are now ‘partners’, perhaps a benefit for Sun will come later.
If only that could mean that Sun will realease a stable 64bits java client and wrap its UI in a non-ugly widget…
if not, I will keep avoiding it.
I will have to keep an eye on google. Sun is a known entity. They would be the next Microsoft, if they could. They’re interested in monopoly status and money, not technology. Google, on the other hand, seems to be interested in technology today. I thought they were more open minded about Free Software, but now I’m not so sure.
But as long as I’m skeptical I can take steps to prevent them from getting too much access to my personal info before its too late.
I need businesses I can trust. Can any be trusted?
I trust Red Hat and SGI for the most part and I really like HP and IBM, Novell is cool. All other non-commercial BSD and FSF projects I trust implicitly. Microsoft, Sun and SCO suck. Everyone else is in a grey area. Google just lost my faith in what I perceived were their values. But that’s the gamble they take when they choose to partner with other large entities, some of their reputation rubs off.
I was wrong, btw, about the Niagra. That’s too bad. Google would have provided Sun a lot of good press for the Niagra. And if the benchmarks show an improvement in performance over PCs they might even have a convincing TCO arguement to backup the decision and prevent people like me from complaining.
I suck. I complain too much. This is good news for everyone.
Don’t be so sure that Niagara is out of the running. Tonight on PBS’ Nightly Business Report, McNealy was asked how Sun will monetize the relationship. He did mention selling hardware to Google, but he did not say anything more specific.
I thing everyone was looking for an announcement of a great new operating system that will solve all their problems. The fact is that NO operating system will succeed against Windows unless the is a COMPLETE lineup of applications and services available for it. If Google and Sun created an operating system today, it would fail. PERIOD. However….
If Google’s plan is to unseat Microsoft they must first create AND get wide acceptance of a suite of applications and services that are not operating system specific, such as OpenOffice. The only way that can be done is to use operating system independent development platforms such as JAVA and get developers on board. Todays announcement is the first step.
Once this is done, Google (and others) can provide services and applications to any platform. If the applications and services that you need will run on any platform, then, and only then will Google create on operating system. Then given the choice between Microsoft and Google, the decision will be easy for everyone to make: GoogleOS.
So… right now it’s just Google Toolbar in JRE’s installer… well… We already have Google Toolbar in some programs’ installers and nobody made all this press…
Looks like it’s just smart marketing… But a lot of people are going to be disappointed… nothing else? nothing that really matters?
I don’t see how this is going to lead into GoogleOperatingSystem. Google, to me, looks like it’s building a better portal, and possibly a better online service. We have to look at the big picture here; why would Google want to build an OS from scratch? They could put out a Linux distro, but they’d need to do a serious amount of DE development to make it usable. Google’s position in the boxed software market is ZERO. They would have to convince Sun, HP, Dell, or someone else to bundle GoogleOS.
Watch the webcast. when questions are asked about an operating system, they dodge the question, and thier body language and the way that they look at each other tells the story. These guys are great at running a company, but they are bad liers. You are right when you say we have to look at the big picture. In order for google to continue to suceed they must continue to reinvent they way they to business. If you were running google, where would you want to be in 2010? How would you go about getting there? Would Sun be a part of that?
Well, I don’t really believe the two will create a full blown OS, but I do believe the real story here is the fact that the two will inevitably build a web based version of OpenOffice. That’s when this partnership will get interesting, becuase such a creation would then threaten the bread and butter of Microsoft. Microsoft has successfully killed every real challenge to their internet and desktop dominance, but it would be very difficult to kill an open source webased office suit. While hosting an application on a webserver for everyone to access is nothing new, with the Google marketing Machine and Suns’ well known, “The web is the future of computing philosophy”, we may finally have a contender that can really put a dent in Microsoft’s dominance. If that were to happen, think of the innovation we’d start seeing out of Redmond.
A “web based version of OpenOffice” will be a threat to Microsoft?
geez what have you been smokin?
from Sun Site! The world will never be the same.
It’s pretty clear for me. Google builds ground-breaking free web applications such as Gmail, Google Groups, etc… Sun is the core developper of StarOffice, basis of OpenOffice.org. Google wants to put a dent into Microsoft’s monopoly. Microsoft’s cash cows are Windows and Office.
What can Google do? Team up with Sun and convert StarOffice or OpenOffice.org into a web-based office suite with 2GB of space for free with sponsored ads
What can Google do? Team up with Sun and convert StarOffice or OpenOffice.org into a web-based office suite with 2GB of space for free with sponsored ads
Then for the corporate market sell an intranet web server with with it and Gmail and other groupware on it. Competes with Office/Outlook and also IBM Workplace. Sun sells servers, Google gets new webservice and there are synergies between the two.
They really didn’t say what they up to.
Other than google buying more Sun hardware, and Sun helping get some google technology out there … it’s stay tuned time.
I bet there is much more going on in the back rooms.
So the google toolbar will be an optional component of Sun jre.
Will the google toolbar spyware be optional?
Or will that be integrated into the jre?
I believe this will be a very successful partnership.
On one side, you have Sun, one of the largest software companies in the world, with very powerful technologies (sun, solaris, open office), and that has a fairly large market share on the server side, but that just don’t know how to do anything right on the client side.
The other company, Google, has a very strong knowledge of the client world, but just does not have the technology to go beyond web applications.
Google could try to create their own linux distribution, and fill up with free open source applications, but why do that, when you can team up with another company such as sun, that has many more resources available?
I really hope they come up with impressive solutions. From what google has shown so far, I’m pretty sure good pieces of software will show up soon.
Add it to gmail. Make sure that Yahoo has it too and offer it to the other webmail providers for not much. See how fast mircosoft will include support for openoffice’s format
People seem to be forgetting than Sun has got pretty impressive cache of technologies for remote delivery of applications over the network/web. Don’t forget that Sun bought Tarantella, which is a very impressive product that is able to deliver pretty much any appliation bet it Unix, Linux, Windows, Mainframe, VAX/VMS, AS/400, etc. over the web to your browser. Google could as well setup a farm of servers hosting OpenOffice and bunch of other applications running through Sun Tarantella servers and being statelessly available anywhere on the Web. The technology is available now and it has been proven during last few years, it is just a matter of putting all the pieces together and commertializing it. Throw Sun Ray on top of that and you’ve got yourself a killer stateless and secure platform that Google can use to really pinch MS.
> Which all sounds and works great in theory and marketing-speak, but simply doesn’t deliver in practise. These things always miss out critical items which render them unusable and overpriced except for a very small niche. Incidently, their “impressive cache of technologies” happens to be nothing everyone else doesn’t already have, or has easy access to.
Jeez dude, you’re full of vitriol and bitterness over this, are you scared of something or you’re just FUD’ding on behalf of some big company whose ass could be on the line if this Sun/Google thing works?
I for one see a real promise in Sun technology and especially in remote delivery of application over the web and ASP (Application Service Provider) model in general and I think Sun is the only company that is truly capable to drive it, since Sun is the only company that has got all the right pieces. If you want to see how Tarantella could work, just check out a demo at :
http://www.tarantella.com/demo/
Allways good to have innovative processes going on 🙂
according to http://www.nos.nl/nos/artikelen/2005/10/art000030060767.html the two companies will deliver online wordprocessing and spreadsheetprogramma’s.