Google will promote Sun Microsystems' word processing and office software products in an alliance that could mark a first stop toward challenging Microsoft Corp's dominance of the computer users' desktops.
Computer maker Sun and Web search company Google gave few details, saying they would jointly promote OpenOffice, Sun's free office productivity software that competes with Microsoft's Office suite of software, and Sun's Java software platform, which runs thousands of PC programs.
Sun will include the Google Toolbar for Web searches as an option when consumers download Java for the desktop.
Java is a software platform that runs many programs but sits on top of different operating systems, from Linux to Windows, making it a potential technological uniter.
Some 700 million computers worldwide run Java - but Sun has had little success commercializing its products to this vast audience. The test of the new relationship will be how far Google, with hundreds of millions of active Web users, goes to promote Sun products.
Java also runs on hundreds of millions of mobile phones, which are seen as the next frontier for competition among major technology companies.
OpenOffice offers many of the same functions of Microsoft's Word word processor, Excel spreadsheet and other applications in its Office business suite perform.
However, OpenOffice has only a tiny fraction of the users of Office, which is many office workers' primary software.