I Could Tell You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

In my last blog, I promised to tell you what I could about my new employers. Well, here we go...

I can tell you -- nothing!

My new employers are very tight-lipped about what we do. I can't even tell you what I do when I work there. Hopefully, some day they will lighten up and give me some room to talk (and maybe I can even score an interview with the CEO for a future blog), but for now I wouldn't hold my breath.

Just be happy someone is willing to pay me to do something on a regular basis.

Now, on other fronts...

About a week ago, I picked up a rumor that Google and Sun were talking acquisition. There were plenty of naysayers to that idea, yet the rumor persists. Rather than discuss how likely the event would be, I'd rather talk about what it might mean as a result.

Sun's biggest revenue generator is still its hardware. I was about to suggest that Google might spin off the Sparc business when it struck me that there was a reason for Google to want some hardware -- you might recall some loose talk about a Google PC? I'm not saying that SPARCstations would be ideal for the purpose, but if you wanted the software arm of Sun and was stuck with the hardware arm, there are worse ways to get to where you want to be.

But, as I said, it's the software arm that would be appealing to Google. Before anyone forgets, Google's top dog was a honcho at Sun once-upon-a-time, and big on Java. It might be that Google has some Java-driven projects that might be more practical if they didn't have to pay license fees on its use.

Then there's this thing called OpenOffice.org (and the less-open relative, StarOffice). Sun and Google had already entered into a cooperation pact that left quite a few people speculating about a web-based version of OpenOffice.org. Some recent, related, acquisitions suggest to me that Google has already bought the people needed to build a web-office suite; would Google apply that knowledge to a fork of OpenOffice.org? Might Google kill the StarOffice product, and force OpenOffice.org to go independent, giving its own web-office suite a chance to catch up?

Google clearly doesn't like Microsoft, so I'm inclined to think such a merger would be good for OpenOffice.org. I'd look for Google to offer more developers to the project, but I also think StarOffice might go away, as Google wouldn't have a practical use for it. I also think Google would then use it's new leverage to put serious development effort into a web-hosted fork of the popular open source office suite.

Of course, I have no inside knowledge of any of this. It's just speculation. Don't make any investments without making your routine investigations.

Oh, and have a nice day!