Will Google Docs Pose a Serious Threat to MS Office in 2008?

Updates are like well wrapped candy that you find in the Christmas tree of the person you’re visiting. He / she asks you to get some, but you never know if they’re expired or not or whether you’ll like his / her taste in sweets. It’s something that you must try on your own, if you’re curious on whether you might like it or not.

Like I said, updates are exactly the same, they
might make the world of difference in improving your user experience, or they might come with a feature that will send you plummeting to the darkest depths of the abyss, if the new feature is wrongly implemented or it brings new problems (see the December 17th Google Reader update).

Google Docs is now flexing its tiny muscles in an attempt to look like the Big Bad Wolf that’s going to scare away Microsoft Office from the computers of its users. It’s back (from outer space) with that sad look upon its face that says "MS, you’re going down!" Is that the case? Let’s see what they bring to the table and perhaps after that, a picture will be presented more clearly.

The Google Presentations have been worked most upon, just to kick off the new year in a lucrative manner. Embeddable presentations have been added (see the "Publish" tab for the code), you can now import slides from other presentations (a huge time save if you ask me), you can drag and drop images from other sites to be inserted in the respective presentation, the background is finally changeable, the toolbar looks like it’s Toolbar 1.1, not so rough on the eye as before, and the option to rearrange slides has been made available. Doesn’t sound like much? It is! Is it enough to challenge MS Office? Not yet, but if they keep things up with the updates coming every two months and having the proportions of this one, it won’t be long until they are ready to put on the gloves and be in the same weight category.

I've almost forgot about the other Google Docs updates, like the adding of a feature that allows users to create sub-folders and rename the documents from the homepage of the service mentioned above, without having to open it and save it as… One thing that I’ve noticed is still not there is the option to upload OpenOffice presentations, and this brings me to a question I asked you last year: forcing users to Google-made products only and thus losing them slowly or opening up to other contenders on the market, thus encouraging them and giving them the traffic?