Quem enxerga um palmo a frente do pito aceso (queimando a ponta do polegar) disse que a união Sun+Google foi 'muito barulho por nada': afinal, que que tem distribuir uma Toolbar junto com o Java? Cringely enxerga um cadinho além:



Windows Vista, nee Longhorn, will arrive on schedule next year and with it, I'm guessing, will be a new version of Office, only this time it will be Office.net -- a much lighter application reliant on back-end Internet services. Turn off those services for more than a few hours and you'll cripple Office. Same too for the new security structure promised in Vista: Stop staying current and IN-security will rapidly follow. The new products will look cheaper, but the area under the Microsoft revenue curve will continue to increase. We haven't for years actually OWNED any Microsoft products. We just own a license to use them. Well soon we'll LEASE a license to use them.

And this may not be bad. Certainly, it will feel more comfortable, at least until Microsoft shows itself to be unworthy of the trust they'll be asking us to give.

At its heart this is a plan to completely circumvent Open Source, to take it completely out of the desktop game while giving Microsoft additional advantages on the server side. This lofty goal deserves a column all to itself and I'll get to that in a couple weeks.

But in the meantime there's Google, which is perceived by Microsoft as its only worthy opponent. It is Microsoft's expectation that Google will launch an Office suite of its own based on Open Office and just as heavily-dependent on Google-labeled back-end services. Maybe, but I think that's underestimating Google.

Google most likely WILL launch a variety of Office-like services that can be accessed through a browser. There will probably be official links to Open Office and Star Office for those who have those products, but the truest form of the art would be to eliminate the traditional Office front-end entirely.

The goal is making the desktop operating system a non-factor. Windows? Linux? Mac? Symbian (remember that one)? What's behind Door Number Three? It won't matter.

At its heart this is a battle between quite similar standards with Google taking Javascript to its limits through a constant interaction of light processes that ought to bring the browser to life in whole new ways versus Microsoft's reliance on the heavy-lifting of XML. I've written before about what I perceive to be XML overkill (it's in this week's links), but the key difference here is between a light app (Office.net) and a NON-app (Google Office).

"MSFT is hobbling on one leg and AJAX is going to kick out the other," a Google programmer once told me.

What's in this for Sun is infrastructure. At the least they'll sell some hardware to Google and probably even make their $1 per processor-per-hour server farms available for Google Office overflow.

There are no losers. Competition is good for everyone.


Vs completa aqui.