Reporters Partly Cloudy About Sun Details

At the Webcast from the Computer History Museum with Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, reporters waited anxiously for the bang. Alas, it ends not with a bang, but a whimper, albeit a big whimper. Admittedly, the scale of the announcement was impressive. Google is teaming up with Sun Microsystems to promote and distribute software technologies by making it easier to freely obtain Sun's Java Runtime Enviroment (JRE), the late October released Google Toolbar, and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, taking the "network is the computer" philosophy to the next level. The new partnership will affect millions of end-users, governments, and businesses, with open-source thin-application ease. "Oh," said the crowd as enthusiasm was siphoned from the room uber-geek CEO style. The thought bubble, thick in the air and almost visible, read, "I dropped everything and hoofed it down here for that?" Where was the talk of Microsoft? The Google Browser? The Google OS? What about Sun president Jonathan Schwartz'