It began as just another search engine startup with a weird name, but now Google has become a multibillion-dollar colossus with its fingers in all sorts of markets. One of them is Web-based software and services, and after starting with just Gmail, Google has put together a fairly powerful suite of Web software that some are calling the "Google Office."
Just like Microsoft's widely used Office suite, Google offers an e-mail program (mail.google.com), an online calendar (calendar.google.com), and a word processing and spreadsheet service (docs.google.com). Google also has a collaboration tool, or wiki—something Microsoft doesn't offer. According to some reports, Google also appears to be planning a Web-based presentation service similar to PowerPoint.
There's no question that Google's "Office" suite doesn't have many of the features that corporate users likely count on when they use Microsoft's products. The word processing program (based on a Web service called Writely, which Google acquired last year) doesn't have a lot of the sophisticated layout tools that Word does, and the spreadsheet program is fairly rudimentary. And since Google's services are Web-based, some companies might have security concerns.
But Google's Web services offer advantages that Microsoft's Office products don't. Not only are they free—while Microsoft's suite costs hundreds of dollars for each employee who uses it—but they also allow collaboration to occur much more easily, in ways that Microsoft's products can't as yet. The wiki service allows dozens of users to edit documents at the same time with just the click of a mouse, and the document- and spreadsheet-creation services allow several people to collaborate—plus it tracks all of their various changes and versions.
The Achilles heel of Web-based services, of course, is that they depend on a user having Internet access. But not only is wireless access becoming more widely available, software makers are exploring ways to allow Web-based products to synchronize with offline software. Zoho, for example, a company that offers a Web-based, Office-style suite much like Google's, has a small software program that stores data whenever Internet access isn't available, and automatically synchronizes it as soon as a user connects. The data can also be synchronized with a free online storage service from Box.net.
Whether these kinds of technologies can keep Google ahead of Microsoft remains a question mark. But it's clear that the line between Web software and "real" software is continuing to blur.
