Google and Sun to join forces in secret project to be announced tonight

4 October 2005 13:52 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google and Sun are holding a joint press release today (10:30 PT, 13:30 ET, and 18:30 BST) in what industry pundits believe could be to announce a number of ventures from a office suite, to operating system to merely buying some server space for its Wi-fi experiment in the US.

The big rumour is that the company will be collaborating to distribute Sun's Star Office - the company's version of OpenOffice now in its ninth version, or a variant of it labelled as the Google office suite to go up against Microsoft and its core business.

Other speculations to be announced at tonight's conference could be that Google has gone one stage further and be launching its own operating system based on Sun's Solaris or Java or users to download again for free.

The third and not very exciting one is that the company is merely announcing a collaboration to buy servers on the cheap for its Wi-fi experiment in San Francisco.

According Sun's website:

Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO and Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman of the Executive Committee and CEO will be discussing a new collaborative effort between the two companies.

We will keep you posted.

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