Sun Microsystems and Google plan to announce a collaborative effort that some analysts speculate could elevate the profile of the OpenOffice.org and Java software packages.

Details won't emerge publicly until Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun CEO Scott McNealy take the stage on Tuesday at a news conference in Mountain View, Calif. But one strong possibility is a partnership that could help shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into Google's.

The partners have complementary assets for such a task. Sun has the open-source OpenOffice.org software suite and its close relative, StarOffice. It has Java software, which is well suited for network-friendly applications that run on any Java-enabled PC.

As for Google, its products have become daily resources for a vast number of computer users, and it offers a growing suite of software. In addition, it has the ambition of becoming the company that supplies network-based applications.

One person who was possibly an influence on the change is Joerg Heilig, who for years was director of engineering for StarOffice at Sun, but who now apparently is a Google employee. Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady said he had heard Heilig had been hired by the search company, and Google's voice mail system includes an employee with that full name.

A hint about the upcoming announcement might lie in Sun President Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry about software distribution, posted Saturday. In recent years, the power of software provision shifted toward Microsoft and away from companies that distribute software, whether through stores or directly to customers, he wrote.

Full article: CNET News.com