Susan Kuchinskas of internetnews.com, eWeek, Scoble and a bunch of others are all reporting that a Google-Sun alliance is set to announce a Google version of Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Sun bring their much vaunted StarOffice codebase to this partnership while Google bring their experience of running massively trafficked web apps.

Google Office is a logical extension of the online Web 2.0 office apps I mentioned last week.

This development, when announced, has the capability to change radically the way people interact with their PCs (and could be an IT Manager’s dream – no more Office install or patch nightmares!).

UPDATE:
The Sun/Google announcement was a bit of an anti-climax after all the rumours. The agreement is:

to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth

So no Google Office – at least not yet anyway! Personally, I think yesterday’s rumour explosion was a kite flying excercise and that we will see a Google Office in the not too distant future for all the reasons expounded yesterday.