San Jose, Calif. – Two years after announcing a somewhat vague software-distribution partnership, Google Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have clarified their tactics for jointly attacking Microsoft Corp. and its ubiquitous Office software.
Over the weekend, Google quietly began including Sun’s StarOffice suite of word-processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of the Google Pack download.
The download package is part of Google’s efforts to expand beyond Web search and control more of users’ computing experience online and off line. It already includes Firefox, the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and RealNetworks’ Real Player, a key rival to Microsoft’s media player.
By adding Sun’s software, Google is giving a valuable endorsement to a server and software maker that saw demand for its products collapse after the dot-com bust and has struggled to return to sustained profitability ever since.
StarOffice is Sun’s commercial version of the freely distributed OpenOffice suite, which was developed by Sun and has been downloaded about 100 million times.
StarOffice typically costs $70 to download but is being distributed by Google for free. It has more features than Open Office and typically includes technical support from Sun, though the free Google version won’t.
Both companies declined to comment on their financial arrangement.
Rich Green, Sun’s executive vice president of software, said Wednesday that Sun also has added Internet search capabilities to all of its StarOffice products. That will allow users, for example, to highlight terms in a word-processing document and search immediately for those terms online – through Google, of course.
