Within a day of my two posts on Microsoft embracing the Open Source championed Open Document Format in Word, to push back Google -- News.com published a report on Google joining the ODF Group!
In my posts Microsoft tyring Open Source to block Google in Office Software? and Microsoft swallows Open Source Pill -- Word converter for ODF format I had wondered whether Microsoft Corp (MSFT) was trying to popularise its proprietary software by being ready to read and write to ODF -- just to quell Google's (GOOG) moves into its office software Category.
It seems wierd to me that Google would spend time on ODF, Writely and Spreadsheets. Search is Google's core business. So I keep wondering whether all this Office like products are just to keep Microsoft off-balance or to really pose threat to Microsoft? I still feel that Writely and Spreadsheets are a ploy by Google to keep Microsoft off its bread and butter web-search territory.
It won't be easy for Google to win friends with the Enterprise world where Microsoft dominates. Privacy issues have caused several enterprises to block Google Desktop. The same concern extends to Writely and Spreadsheets. If data can be saved outside the enterprise, the intellectual property developed by the enterprise could get out of its control.
A second report by news.com confirms Microsoft's threat perception of Google's advances into its territories:
"Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business," Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, told a conference of more than 7,000 business partners...."Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off of our plate, because that is what they are intending to do," he said.
Earlier in the week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer listed search--Google's bread and butter--as one of his company's most important areas of investment. "Search from the desktop to the enterprise to the Internet is a business of great importance and a market of great importance to us," he said Tuesday. Ballmer said the enterprise search market represents more than $13 billion, and that the software maker has signed up 35 partners to focus on that area.
