Nasty, but true. From today's WSJ.
--QS
Sun Hopes Hanging With Its New Friend Makes It Look Cool
October 12, 2005; Page B1
What a pity that Scott McNealy was on stage as a participant, and not back in his office as an observer, during last week's big news conference between Sun Microsystems and Google. Mr. McNealy, Sun's boss, is a master of the savage, funny put-down, and I would love to have heard his riff on the event.
Sun and Google are as big names as Silicon Valley has to offer, and the mere announcement late Monday afternoon that the two were planning something was itself news. Wall Street analysts were forced to rush out research reports speculating about what might be in store.
They needn't have bothered. The actual event was a model for how well-known companies can make a major media event out of a nothingburger. All that is required are a few transactional-sounding but empty phrases, a couple of vague promises and the implicit invocation of the Microsoft boogeyman, all baked together as a "strategic relationship."
You can tell the meagerness of Tuesday's offerings by the highlight: Sun will offer the Google Toolbar Web search aid in some of its own software downloads.
Google, however, has one of the Web's best-known brands, and hardly needs help getting its software to the masses. And to the extent it does, Google already has Toolbar distribution deals with other companies, such as RealNetworks, that see far more consumer traffic than Sun's geek-oriented site.
So, Sun offering Google help in distributing its software has a certain "as if" quality to it, like me offering Orlando Bloom help in meeting girls. How nice of Google to play along.
The other Tuesday highlight was Google's promise that it would "explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies." But if Google really thinks those technologies are so grand, why doesn't it, you know, use them?
It doesn't; not to any noteworthy degree. The hardware behind Google is a massive network of thousands of commodity personal computers running Linux. While Google said last week that it did use some Sun hardware, and promised to use still more, it gave no details -- probably because the details were too embarrassing to give.
More important, Google's ever-expanding catalog of desktop programs -- the Toolbar, Gmail, Google Maps and the rest -- don't typically use Sun's Java language, but instead several nonproprietary technologies. Chief among these is Ajax, a Web programming style that now has the sort of buzz once enjoyed by Java.
Sun endlessly hyped Java as the successor to Windows bloatware. (It also once promised Java gas pumps and Java soda machines, but let's not dwell on the past.) Google is now coming as close as anyone ever has to living the dream of a world without Windows -- but not on Sun's terms.
Indeed, the fact that Google has been able to generate a market capitalization six times that of Sun's while buying so little of Sun's product portfolio shows the uphill fight Sun faces in a world of powerful cheap PCs and free software.
The elephant in the room last week was Microsoft. Sun and Google executives declined all offers to discuss how their appearance might mark some kind of new united front to take on Redmond. Sun owns OpenOffice.org, an open-source Microsoft Office competitor. Despite favorable reviews and a cool, free software vibe, however, the software doesn't appear to have a lot of marketplace traction.
Few doubt Google will continue with products, like Desktop Search, that chip away at the Microsoft edifice. But rolling out a full-blown clone of Microsoft Office just doesn't sound like Google's style. Offering to give San Francisco free wi-fi: that's more like Google, if only for the vaguely scary scope of its ambition.
Should Google do damage to Redmond, there is no reason to believe any significant advantage will accrue to Sun as a result. (And why would Google want to share the spoils?) That parade seems to have passed Sun by -- and moved on to Google.
What really happened last week is that Sun, eager for a mojo transplant from the studs of search, used its connection to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a former Sun exec, to get its name in the same headline. "Sun and Google TEAM UP" (capital letters are theirs) was blasted all over Sun's home page.
These little kabuki plays are so common in Silicon Valley it's easy to forget that billions in real investor dollars are made or lost each time the curtain goes up on one. The mere announcement of an impending Sun-Google news conference sent Microsoft shares down slightly on Tuesday in their second-heaviest day of trading this year.
During its heyday, Sun, not Google, was Canterbury for hopeful technology pilgrims. The role-reversal evidenced last week, combined with the news-free news release, would have been a perfect setup for one of Mr. McNealy's schadenfreude-soaked wisecracks.
With him out of the picture, won't some other CEO out there step into the breach? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Send your comments to lee.gomes@wsj.com |
