Could a non-specialist investor blogger have an impact on Sun’s share price?Sun: A Nice Stock Risk, posts Shel Israel, Scoble’s partner in crime.Let consider a scenario. Shel has a widespread readership, which could be significantly magnified by t…

Everthing is pure speculation at this point, but real business will prevail. How does Google benefit here? They could take OO and repurpose it themselves and they could partner with any hardware vendor to get gChips if they wanted. I can think of only 1 thing such an agreement gives Google access to that no one has picked up on but it’s still just speculation.

We can all dream of ways industry players could leverage complementary assets/portfolios to create innovative synergy. Profits and reality tend to get in the way. Too bad, b/c if buyers and users could pick of pieces of different companies and combine them the way they want we’d have some cool stuff coming out.

Speculations… One things clear, we were all duped into consuming a publicity stunt and wasted our time.

Anthony: they could very well take a subset of the code and repurpose it, or they could take the knowledge of the folks who built and start from scratch borrowing here and there. the real question at the end of the day is the same: does Google have ambitions at an office productivity product? i don’t know, but my guess is yes.

Jaime: i’m certainly not for reinventing the wheel, but for me it depends on what they want to do. if they want to deliver a client-side version, i think they’d be foolish to not start with the OO.o codebase. if it’s a web office suite, however, i frankly don’t know how portable the current codebase would be.

Mike: totally agree. i think there’s definitely more to come from these folks, and that we’ll be looking back on this as a significant announcement. the viability of hosted applications has been radically improved over the last few years, and Google’s in good position to take advantage of that.

Chris: yup, we’re definitely on the same page there.

Raghu: i guess i don’t share your lack of faith in the OO.o engineers. products evolve over time, and just because the current OO.o codebase is large and complex does not mean that its maintainers are incapable of making improvements. how many applications that you know of - Word included - couldn’t be improved the second time around?

Lately I’ve seen Jonathan mention a few times that for “search companies” their highest single cost can be the electricity bill (whether for the whole company or just the data-center, I dunno). For something like Google, a 1U Niagara server would likely provide significantly more performance (throughput) than the best 1U x86 servers while consuming significantly less power.

Let’s say for the sake of example that a 1U Niagara server would provide 2x the performance of the best dual-core Opteron server, at half the power consumption (for the whole system). This is quite possible but obviously highly speculative - and actual results would depend on Google’s software. That would mean for the same performance, the Niagara solution would consume one quarter the power and take up half as much space. If Google’s electrical bill is 50% of (datacenter) running costs, then Niagara would reduce their running costs by 37.5%. And they’d have a lot more room for expansion.

Even if the Niagara systems had similar price/performance compared to Opteron, it could win easily on running costs - Niagara is a very big chip, so will be expensive to manufacture.

Google’s giving everyone 2.5GB of email, searchable, for free right now. Why not make that 2.5GB of desktop space? And why not, then, change StarOffice to use an SSL interface to a remote file system, managed by Google, where all your documents live? Search, sharing, collaboration, support for mobility are all easier if there’s a central repository you can always reach, and that you can trust.

Microsoft bought Groove this year. Groove provides just these services.

Companies like desktop.com started four years ago but failed because there wasn’t enough broadband to make remoteness attractive, and they weren’t adequately funded to provide the storage space for free. Google has neither of those problems.

If I were working at the Googleplex, that’s what I’d make happen.