Google Tries To Replace Microsoft Office

Google rivals Microsoft with free Web applications
James Coates


October 29, 2006

If Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and the other members of the Microsoft billionaires club don't feel something mighty hot breathing down their necks, it's probably because they don't have accounts for Google's free online productivity packages.

For a great many people now using some version of Microsoft Office, it's finally possible to do it all for free using Google's newly expanded set of tools that, at last, include Writely, a word processor that looks and feels like Microsoft Word and even handles existing Word files.

Writely comes up in a browser window with a Microsoft Word-type toolbar on top that includes all of the features I'll ever need to write columns, if not entire books. This includes fancy text, a tab to insert images, undo/redo options to back out of errors and a lightning fast word counter.

Also big is a set of collaboration tools that let users do things like work on the same document at the same time no matter where each individual collaborator may be on the planet.

All you need is a Web browser and a Gmail account for Web-based e-mail and other Google services. That is available for free at http://gmail.google.com.

Gmail exploded in less than a year from just another Web e-mail player to an advertising-financed scheme that incorporates the same tools that cost several hundreds of dollars per computer in ad-free Microsoft Office.

Gmail comes with an associated Calendar module that mimics much of the scheduling and meeting invitation features of Microsoft's Outlook for Office. Gmail's own address book service has most of the features of Microsoft Outlook's Contacts module.

Gmail also permits live chats and even voice mail for those with microphones plugged in.

Months ago, Google added an Excel compatible spreadsheet program that works in a browser and lets users handle the great bulk of computational and data tracking done in Microsoft Office.



Writely versus Word

As the icing on the virtual cake, Google has added Writely, a move that has been long anticipated by everybody from us propellerheads to Wall Street shakers, who now clearly see how Google is confronting Microsoft with the first real challenge that its enormously successful Office franchise has ever faced.

For two decades, Microsoft has squeezed trainloads of cash out of corporations and households alike, selling its productivity software that long enjoyed a giant advantage because the maker of the Windows operating system built it.

This gave Microsoft's software writers far better knowledge than others of the underlying operating system, and the result was that Word, Excel and Outlook really were better than its few challengers.

However, the gatekeepers of Google saw that the Internet itself was actually a great global operating system in its own right because one can create software that uses Web browsers instead of a computer user's own machine to do the work.

At first, all Web programmers could do was use a primitive set of instructions called HTML to tell a browser to put a headline of specified type and format above a block of text to display a picture or two along with hot links to other pages.

Soon after, non-Microsoft programmers expanded HTML to include bits of code that acted like programs running on a computer's operating system. The first to gain major attention was the Java system of instructions, called scripts, that forced a browser to do things like display animations, do arithmetic and take orders for whatever the Web site owner was selling.

Most recently, a system called Ajax came along to permit the most sophisticated of enhancements, like something I just did with the text I'm writing for this column. I am working in Microsoft Office on a PC and I used Windows to display the Word screen alongside a blank Writely document in my Web browser connected to Google's service. I am able to paint text in Word and then use the mouse to drag and drop that text directly into the Writely document.

This means that not only does Google offer a free set of tools that can replace Microsoft Office, but the Google tools are able to work within Office as well as totally outside.



Microsoft versus open source

Microsoft didn't get to where it is by being a fiefdom of fools, and the company lashed out on many fronts trying to slow down this kind of competition by offering its own stuff. Most notable were a scripting language called ActiveX and alterations of Microsoft products, such as the Visual Basic programming language to create code to operate in Web browsers.

But all of these Microsoft efforts have been eclipsed in recent years by so-called open source competition capable of wonders like the aforementioned Ajax.

The result is that Microsoft has made a huge about-face and rebuilt Office into a splendid Web-centered showpiece of programming now in advanced Beta status that does much to handle its own documents and services through connections to the Internet instead of just on a single computer or one company's network.

But with the release of Writely, Google rounds out a free package of Office killers--albeit advertising-laced tools--that mimic and challenge Microsoft's costly productivity product as it never has been confronted before.


Google Docs and Spreadsheets