Google and Sun Microsystems have planned a joint press conference for Tuesday, and the buzz is centering on OpenOffice and Java, two of Sun's assets. OpenOffice is making a lot of news recently, as its development team readies the release of OpenOffice 2.0 (a stable release candidate is available now). This version is attractive, writes files to an open format, and accepts Microsoft Office documents with most formatting intact. I have thrown fairly complex Word styles into Open Office with good results. This CNET piece speculates that Google would be an ideal distribution partner for OpenOffice. In fact, why not Google Office? That would be fairly blockbuster, and is fairly unlikely. All this, of course, is (or should be) threatening to Microsoft.
