Hey all, Mike here. Just watched the Sun/Google presscon 31 minutes ago, where Sun CEO Scott McNealy, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on stage to announce a bundling of the Google Toolbar and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Scott says that bundling will be available for download at java.sun.com "in a matter of weeks, if not days".

Scott claims that "what Netscape did for JRE, JRE will do for the Google Toolbar". Considering that JRE gets 21 million downloads a month, that may not be an empty boast. When Scott points out that he espects that number to grow from this deal -- after all, Google gets 80 million unique visitors a month -- ex-Sun employee Eric jokingly quips: "You didn't tell me that in the negotiations."

The executives gave visionary-yet-vague-and-anti-Microsoft responses to reporters' pointed questions -- mostly about teaming up against Microsoft, creating a new OS, and putting Google web services in OpenOffice. Jonathan expects both sides of the new alliance to surprise each other.

So when you put Google and Java together, do you get "Joogle" or "Gooava"?