Sun Microsystems and Google are going to be joining forces to start promoting OpenOffice, the open source office suite. This is great news because I use OpenOffice, on my laptop, and on the iMac. Anything to popularize this will make it a stronger program.
At first I was a little confused on why Google would be doing this, but as usual John Battelle gives an excellent analysis of what is going on. As part of the deal, Google’s toolbar will be downloaded with OpenOffice downloads, thus giving Google more presence on the desktop, pushing further into Microsoft’s home turf.
Watching tech giants Google and Microsoft go head-to-head is going to be great fun. I can’t wait to see what happens over the next few years. It should be an amazing time as a user of technology to watch thing get better and better as they try to win users mind share.
