Sun + Google is about Desktop Java

Friends who are asking -- who are as confused as I was by the Sun/Google Non-Announcement -- need only look to that most perceptive commentator, David Berlind, for a possible answer:

Although Sun would probably dispute this (after all, the deal has Google leveraging Sun's distribution of Java, not the other way around), desktop Java has long needed a sugar daddy. And, as one of the few companies with the reach, the resolve (to disrupt the status quo), the cash, the Java expertise (Adam Bosworth, anyone?), and various desktop application implementations that fall an imperceptible sliver short of where desktop Java can start to take them, Google is the hottest prospect to come desktop Java's way in a long time. Maybe forever. With Outlook Web Access (OWA), Microsoft may have been the first to take Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) mainstream. But, in a variety of applications from email to maps, Google has been the one to not only perfect it, but to also turn it against Microsoft. Now, all Google must do is give the "J" in "AJAX" the dual personality that Microsoft would have never given it, and there's very little if anything that Google and Sun won't be able to deliver to our destkops that, until today, required a significant amount of local resources (processor, hard drive, memory, etc.). Required resources by the way that are going up in the next wave of the fat client's cartel's alternative, not down.

(That last bit is the kicker.) According to this thread of reasoning, Google will use Java and or AJAX to run just about any application on our desktops delivered from server-side via the browser.

What I am wondering is why they chose to announce this and did not keep it quiet. It would ceteris parabis be better to surprise the FAT CLIENT desktop incumbent -- even if this is a quasi-practical joke.

The wide scope of the possibility of Google delivering almost any app, now makes my OpenOffice-centered view earlier today seem myopic.

I think they're just grabing Microsoft by the tail and whirling it around their heads. McNealy & Schmidt -- the old Sunnies -- are farting about having a laugh. Just funnin' while Ballmer throws chairs.