• by Shankar Gupta , November 1, 2005

In the first development in the Sun Microsystems-Google pact since its announcement last month, a Google executive has said that the company intends to hire programmers to beef up OpenOffice, Sun's open source office utility suite. Doing so would position the product for a battle with Microsoft Office.

Google's Manager for Open Source Programs, Chris DiBona, was recently quoted in the media as saying that the search giant will be hiring programmers to "make OpenOffice better," by paring down the program's memory requirements or its large download size--80MB.

A Google spokeswoman, however, was tight-lipped about future plans when asked about DiBona's statement. "Google leverages open source software in its development efforts and strongly believes in supporting the open source community. We are involved in a variety of open source initiatives, including OpenOffice.org," said the spokeswoman. "We plan to contribute to the OpenOffice.org project and are always looking for good engineers to contribute to our open source efforts, but do not have any specifics to share at this time."

Although the Sun Microsystems-Google partnership that was announced last month was touted as a shot across the bow to competitor Microsoft, both OpenOffice and Sun's own StarOffice, which is based on the open source code, have nowhere near the market ubiquity of Microsoft Office.

Jupiter Research Analyst Gary Stein said it's premature to predict StarOffice or OpenOffice challenging Microsoft's own office product, even though it may look as if Google and Sun are gearing up for a fight. "They seem like they're continuously positioning themselves to go after Microsoft Office," he said. "When you look at what they're doing with StarOffice, it looks like they're just starting to build up those resources. But to say that it's going to be a challenge is premature."

And even if Google does help develop StarOffice and OpenOffice into appealing alternatives to MSOffice, Microsoft's entrenched position makes it a tough opponent to face. "StarOffice has been an alternative from the beginning; it's never been very successful at attracting people," he said. "[Microsoft office] is just a formidable enemy; it's going to take more than just having an alternative."