I don't see Google posing a threat yet to Microsoft's most important market, the corporate world. When employees time is worth at least 30 dollars an hour, companies want to get them the most productive, efficient, and safe productivity software, even if it costs a lot of money despite there being free alternatives. As for the home use market, I could easily see Microsoft loose that one, either to Google or to their own free web version of Office.

At home i have been using open office and it is great.

MS Office will be hard to pull out of the hands of businesses. Local versions have little to no chance of bringing down an entire work group. If the online editor servers go down for a company, then entire work groups will instantly go on overhead. Depending on the size of the company a single document editing server going down could cost more than buying MS Office for each employee and his poodle. The other reason locally installed editors will never die is security. Local encryption is generally safer than network encryption.

Besides, when did Dell/HP/Acer/whoever stop installing MS Works on computers? I have only purchased it once for College and got it discounted through the book store!

interesting, it would figure that a free, light weight OS should be able to kick the arse of windows, on netbooks atleast. but then, how is it any more likely to do this than linux? linux came out on the first netbook (the original eeepc) but now they all seem to be in favor of windows? it will be interesting to see how chromeOS differentiats its self from the OS on which its based in order to succeed where it has failed.

Open Office is all I need. That being said, I don't necessarily enjoy Google and Microsoft competing; it's bad for everyone. There are things that both do better than the other and if one was to get shoved out the market would be worse for it.

@matt:

As a part-time Linux user, the mainstream public will never trust it. Everyone knows and trusts Google, but if someone in the mainstream even knows what linux is, they probably have only heard horrid IT stories about how unstable it can be.

uSoft has been attempting to do something like this for over a decade. I always believed the true purpose of the .Net initiative was to compartmentalize apps so that pieces could be remote hosted. If either Google or uSoft succeeds, they will attempt yet again to achieve the holy grail of web programming, subscription applications. As for myself, I will continue to choose: Install Everything.

I'd rather steer away from this competitive mess too and pick the third party.

Neither Google web apps, MS office web apps nor Open Office will touch the corporate base, judging by some of the truely awesome (and expensive) add ins that exist for Excel/Word etc. The investments they've made in this area make it insurmountable. Home users are going to stick with MS by and large because of this familiarity, Google should move on.

The difference between Google Docs and Office online? I don't need Silverlight to use Google Docs.

Well Im willing to bet that you already have installed Java, Flash Player, Quicktime,and Windows Media Player Plugin. So whats the problem with installing Silverlight?

Anyway, I would have to think that Excel is the real 500Lb gorilla in the room. Honestly their really isnt anything like it, not even in open office. Sure Open Office has a "Spread Sheet" app but nothing like Excel and no where near the power and amount of plugins.

Funny, what goes around comes around! Didn't MS do the same thing to Netscape Navigator?

Does anyone know if Google's online spreadsheet app does calculations through the web browser? Because I've had to analyze thousands of data points in Excel before, and even on a fast computer it takes a few seconds for each page to render correctly. My guess would be that a browser would crash trying to do the same.

This is also a reason why I am waiting for the 64-bit edition of Office. Excel will reap great benefits, possibly more than any other x64 app on the market.

I know for that I will be sticking to Microsoft Office for the forseeable future, not because I am a Microsoft mule that some will probably accuse me of, but because aside from Windows, that's one other Microsoft software that I love to use.

I tried OpenOffice while using Linux on VMWare. It's quick and all that, but I still like Office.

Yes for Java and Flash, no for Quicktime and WMP plugins. I use either VLC or Mplayer for web media. And that was before I started using Linux; I hated Quicktime on Windows.
But my point is more along the lines of, why is Silverlight necessary? Google seems to do alright without Flash or Air or any of that other stuff, just basic, standard web tools. What's going to be so special about Office that it needs it?



The fact that MS doesn't release Silverlight for my preferred OS? We've got an open source project that's just now starting to support Silverlight 2.0, while MS is rolling out 3.
It's a bit of an academic exercise for me, personally. I don't use web apps for basic office stuff. Just thinking that it would probably be easier to deploy and adopt if it didn't depend on anything specific to MS.

Competition bad for everyone? Microsoft NEEDS another player in the field they hold. Google is the only company big enough to fund a battle against Micro$oft. We might see revolutionary improvements in the years to come. I say, "Let the games begin"! There's nothing like good competition.

Call me shallow but to be %100 honest, other office apps just arent as pretty as MS Office. Google Docs or Open Office might be functional but I hate the feeling of using Word 97 all over again. Untill the competition spends some time making their GUIs look modern, MS it is.

So who's batman and who's the joker?

The company who wins the competition will be the batman.

I was very excieted about Google apps. I planned on implementing in my small business. However, there are so many glitches and incompatibility issues, I think it will be a very long time before it is a threat. For example, when I try to convert a MS doc to a Google doc, the formatting is all wrong. What's the point? If I have to spend hours fixing these conversion errors, I might as well just keep exchanging attachements with my staff. My hope was to have one repository for everything and let everyone pull or modify the docs from the same location. For crying out loug, Google docs does not even have a way to set margins. It is like being back in the lat 80's with a pretty GUI. After spending dozens of hours with Google docs, I realized how GREAT MS Office really is. BTW: I hate Microsoft and I love Google.