The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Google and the Sun Don't Shine You can Google this software

1. Sunburn

Sun Microsystems (SUNW) was red-hot this week over its date with Google (GOOG).

The struggling software outfit teased investors Monday morning by hinting at a "collaborative effort" with everyone's favorite search engine. Sun shares shot up 6.6% as investors speculated about the deal, whose details were to be announced at 1:30 Tuesday afternoon Eastern Daylight Time.

The breathing only got heavier Tuesday morning, as Sun stormed out of the gate to a morning intraday high of $4.56 -- a level it hadn't seen since Jan. 13 -- and volume tripled its daily average by noon. The plainspoken buy-and-hold investors who frequent the message boards had high hopes for the deal, TheStreet.com's Ronna Abramson noted. They weren't the only ones. Abramson pointed to a recent blog posting in which Sun operating chief Jonathan Schwartz said, "If I were a betting man, I'd bet the world was about to change."

Just after noon, Sun and Google let the rest of the world in on their secret. It turned out to cover the open-source software Open Office, Google's free toolbar and Sun's widely available Java Runtime Environment.

"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," the companies said.

So they're going to make it easier to "freely obtain" software that was free on the Web already? Well, now that does change everything.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 93. "People are still writing desktop-server applications," Sun chief Scott McNealy scoffed in a press conference swipe at Microsoft (MSFT). "That's so last millennium." Sure, this from a guy whose stock is down 89% this millennium.