Google and Sun Announce a Joint Agreement - New York Times

Google and Sun Announce a Joint Agreement - New York Times: "The collaboration will significantly raise the profile of Sun's OpenOffice, a suite of software applications that offers many functions of Microsoft Office, including a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program. But Mr. Schmidt gave no details on how Google might be involved in OpenOffice. 'We're going to work to make the distribution of it more broad,' he said."

Reality check: OpenOffice.org is not a Sun product, although it was bootstrapped with a project Sun open-sourced. StarOffice is a Sun product, and it's one even fewer people are likely to be eager to pay for, if, e.g., Google becomes a major OpenOffice.org advocate. And even if StarOffice 8 garners some strong reviews (e.g., see recent eWeek article), most are based on a dubious comparison of $70 (download)/$100 (enterprise license) for StarOffice versus "nearly $500" SRP for Office -- when was the last time a consumer, for example, left a retail store (or Amazon.com) with anything other than a student/teacher version of Office ($99.99 on Amazon.com at the moment, and BTW the license is for up to 3 PCs)?