Net Results:  So what's up with that Sun-Google partnership, anyway? Readers might recall the much anticipated announcement of a multiyear matchmaking deal between the two big California companies last October.

Rumour sites and weblogs were awash with speculation as to what this partnership would entail - was Google buying Sun (unlikely, but given Google's deep pockets, maybe)? Was Sun buying Google (very unlikely)? Was there some exciting new product or service in the offing?

In the end, it turned out to be news that just made people shrug and say, "so what?".

First, the Google Toolbar, a useful little item, would come bundled with every free download of Sun's Java Runtime Environment. Google would buy more Sun servers. And some teams would collaborate on software development, in particular Sun's OpenOffice productivity suite of open source software.

The latter included mention that OpenOffice would perhaps feature a Google search box - something Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer made fun of when he was in Ireland late last year. Microsoft hardly saw a searchbox in a piece of rarely-used open-source software as a major threat, he indicated to journalists. Ouch.

The general reaction to this news was disappointment. The public wanted the equivalent of Google Earth - a really, really cool new thing to come from the partnership that was tangible and immediate. Analysts were split - nice idea, could be good for Sun, a bit of a damp squib.

So on a recent visit to Sun in Silicon Valley, I was especially interested in talking to someone about the Google-Sun partnership. I had one question: why?

"It was initially a sort of marriage of convenience," says Curtis Sasaki, vice-president at Sun web properties. Sasaki, who previously worked in senior management positions at General Magic, NeXT and Apple Computer, also spent a couple of years at Sun's strategic software development centre in Dublin.

There have always been close ties between Sun and Google, he says, noting that there are "a lot of ex-Sun employees over at Google, including Eric Schmidt". Google's chairman and chief executive, Schmidt, came to Google from Novell, but before that he was chief technology officer and corporate executive officer at Sun.

"It's funny that we went along all these years without a more formal relationship," he muses. The more formal relationship began "at a lower level, with a lot of 'ahas!'," he says.

Google - which seems to make an acquisition or launch a new service every five minutes these days - "is trying to develop a better desktop experience. It's all about getting people to use more of Google."

Google's interest was piqued when the company was told that Sun averages about 20 million downloads of Java every month. That's a heck of a lot of downloads it could use for sending out its desktop tool to people who might not bother to initiate a download on Google's own website.

That became the basis for the "marriage", though as they talked, the two companies found many other synergies, says Sasaki - but more of those in a moment.

What is clear from talking to Sun is that there is some obvious frustration that the partnership's coverage and analysis was entirely viewed in the context of what Google could do for Sun, and what advantage Sun might get out of it.

"Interestingly, it's more to Google's advantage. The press didn't really get that," he says.

Of course, that is probably because Google's shares at the moment are worth about $375 (€311.25), while Sun's are $5. Google is riding high, whereas Sun has been in the long-term doldrums, though with new products, services and strategy, it is showing signs of having the wind in its sails.

Sun also seems - at least, to me - a bit exasperated that Google has not really made much fuss over its gains from the deal, nor has it publicised further developments within the partnership. Chief among these "synergies" is that Google has placed what Sasaki terms a "significant" number of programmers on the OpenOffice project.

What does an office suite do for Google? Well, says Sasaki, the latest release of OpenOffice (which gets a lot of Sun investment and development time these days) allows many media inputs and outputs. For example, users can easily embed video, Flash animations, music, images, pdf files, voice files and more.

How might someone use that capability? "We're talking about blogs, photocasting, instant messaging chat, web publishing" and, eventually, web services.

What has Google been doing of late? It is getting interested in multimedia services and offerings, with its own e-mail, chat and blogging tools, photo editing tools, mobile phone services, search tools for images and video, and internet phone services.

"If you put two and two together, you can see this product [ OpenOffice] dramatically changes what people can do with different types of content and documents," says Sasaki. He notes that Sun could open up the mobile phone world for Google too, since 800 million phones run Java.

But surely this isn't just all about Google? No, says Sasaki.

Sun sees the opportunity to sell more hardware and services on the back of companies using OpenOffice. The company has also seen some incremental revenue from the partnership, and Sasaki says further announcements can be expected in the future as connections between the companies expand.

One footnote to all this is Google's recent purchase of an online word processor called Writely. This allows for online collaboration on documents and online storage of work, among other things. Is that deal a threat to Sun and Google's OpenOffice collaborative work? Probably not. Some sort of integrated service comes to mind.

While all of this hardly poses any immediate threat to Microsoft Office and its gargantuan market share lead, perhaps Ballmer was laughing a bit too early. There are very interesting possibilities in bringing together OpenOffice and Google's products and services.

Whatever happens next, the desktop space is no longer sacrosanct.

klillington@irish-times.ie weblog: http://weblog,techno-culture.com