After getting excited (against my better judgement) about today’s Google+Sun announcement, it’s turned out that the all the noise was primarily about a marketing junket — the most notable software announcement was an earthshaking Google Toolbar bundling deal.
I was expecting some noise about Google and OO — perhaps a Save to Google Storage in OO’s Save As dialog, or beefed up OO document search powered by Google. In retrospect, of course, both of those were silly — Google’s ‘standards’ approach would mean the only way they’d ever offer file storage would be WebDAV and Google Desktop already searches OO files just fine.
Of course, the Web 2.0 types who got excited about a ‘webified’ OpenOffice (like many of Scoble’s commenters) had better not hold their breath. Current browser technology, even with AJAX, is very fragile (Gmail’s autosave, for example, is very flaky and I’d be very interested to see if Yahoo’s new mail handles drag/drop well — Oddpost had frequent problems) and definitely not the platform you’d want to build a solid productivity app on. And OO.o’s desktop heritage pretty much precludes it from being an effective browser-based cross-platform app… Google would have better luck with Mozilla’s XULRunner (and given Google’s wooing of the Mozilla foundation and Eric Schmidt’s refusal to get into discussing Open Office today I believe they have come to the same conclusion).
Consequences for Google: What is interesting is that with today’s announcement it’s the second time Google fans have expected red meat but come away disappointed. As a Google user since google.stanford.edu, I associate Google with simplicity and simplification — i.e., Google’s products reduce noise, not add to it. Google Search obviously reduced search noise, Gmail (either by itself or by scaring the bejeezus out of its competitors) reduced noise by removing the tedium of constantly having to delete email. Google Talk added to the noise by adding Yet Another Client to an already crowded market, and today’s announcement did not help matters. Google’s upcoming Calendar product had better be orders-of-magnitude stunning for the company to recover some of its mojo.