And Google has mammoth distribution power, O'Grady said. "Google has the ability to get into exponentially more places than does OpenOffice," he said, including places that "may never have heard of (OpenOffice.org) in the first place."
Microsoft counts Office as a major revenue source and continues to develop the product. A beta version of the upcoming Office 12 is due in November. Although the new version has some server-centric features, the product is still fundamentally a PC-based application suite.
Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
There already are close ties between the two companies, observed Caris & Co. analyst Mark Stahlman, who in the early 1990s heard talk at Sun about building the kind of network services that Google now is providing. Among the ties: Google chief executive Schmidt was Sun's chief technology officer in the 1990s; John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, is on the board of both companies; and Andy Bechtolsheim, a Sun co-founder who returned to the company to launch its Galaxy servers, wrote a check for $100,000 that helped get Google started.
In addition, Google is an active Java user. Since 2004, it has been a member of the Java Community Process steering committee that governs the fate of the technology. Though Java hasn't caught on widely for running desktop software, it has long had the potential to undermine Microsoft's strength by providing an alternative program foundation to Windows.
Other avenues for cooperation between the companies exist. Google's data center could use Sun's "Galaxy" line of AMD Opteron-based x86 servers and, though they're farther afield from Google's current x86-based systems, its upcoming Niagara-based Sparc-Solaris machines that are geared for Web-oriented tasks.
Sun's top two executives have repeatedly praised Google's influence. "Google is probably the most important application your CIO (chief information officer) delivers to you," McNealy said in a speech in September. And Schwartz used Google to highlight Google's power to bypass computing decision-makers and reach directly to the computer users.
"How many CIOs picked Google? Zero. How many employees use it? All of them," Sun's president said in a February speech. "Consumers have a great deal of influence."
Wall Street responded favorably to a news advisory about the Sun-Google partnership, sending Sun's stock up 26 cents, or 7 percent, to $4.19 at the close of trading Monday. Google rose $2.22, or 1 percent, to $318.68.
Microsoft isn't the only company that could suffer from a Google-sponsored thrust to rival desktop computing applications, Interarbor Solutions analyst Dana Gardner said. "IBM is in this game as well with their middleware-to-the-client strategy," he said. IBM's approach combines a version of OpenOffice with browser access to Domino and Notes server software. Its focus, though, is on businesses, while Google also has consumers in its crosshairs.
In the longer term, Sun believes applications will move to the network. That's a possibility even with office applications.
"It seems almost irresistible for Google and Sun to combine Google's ubiquitous reach with Sun's grid, Java and server strengths, to deliver hosted access to resources that could cause some pre-winter chills to run through Redmond," Robert Frances Group analyst Michael Dortch said.
In September, Sun's McNealy reiterated his belief that thin clients will prevail, with central servers handling the heavy lifting of computing rather than PCs.
But centrally hosted office software would require some major engineering to be widely used. In 1999, Sun had plans for a Java-based version of StarOffice, called StarPortal, that could run on the network so that Java-enabled devices could access it. On Monday, though, Sun said, "there are currently no plans for a Java version of StarOffice."
