After some pretty rampant speculation, it turns out that the big Google/Sun announcement was much ado about nothing. Basically they announced some strategic partnerships and cross-promotional agreements, for instance the Google Toolbar being bundled with the JVM (ignore the fact that this sort of thing usually disenfranchises customers). Zzzzzzz.

The world didn't change today, and it turns out that my use of the word "baseless" a couple of days ago was entirely on the mark. Phew, I was worried that I would look pretty silly about that.

What I find remarkable, though, is the things that people thought that Google would pull out of their hat today: From an amazing AJAX-enabled web Office Suite that would eviscerate Microsoft Office, to a full-scale operating system (again to attack Microsoft...all things revolve around Microsoft). The expectations were super-sized. While Google is undoubtedly a very technically capable firm full of some extremely clever people, and they've got a brilliant business plan that allows them to put more money and resources into web apps than just about anyone, the leap from Google Maps and Google Mail to an Office competitor is colossal.

Of course we've seen this sort of ridiculous over-estimation of Microsoft's competitors before. It's been the Year That Linux Takes The Desktop for half a decade now (isn't Microsoft supposed to be dead by now?), and the great Java Office suite is always just a little ways from being viably competitive, and of course the most famous of all was Netscape: Here was a company that put together a piece of software of a complexity level comparable to Windows accessory applications, and suddenly they were perceived as the company that was capable of anything - toss together a full-scale, feature rich operating system and all supporting applications? Why not! Netscape, despite delivering a couple of fairly simplistic applications, could accomplish anything in the eyes of many. Well, actually they couldn't, and their browser codebase started to rot until they were irrelevant, with scavengers picking at the corpse. Whoops!

I root for no side in the great Google versus Microsoft fight, and ultimately I hope the competition serves the consumer very well, however there needs to be some realism in the expectations that people are setting.