Last week The Internet Marketing Monitor decided to give Google's newly released Apps Premier a trial run.  So far we're probably still technically in the "playing" part of the trial.  Mandy has been using it pretty extensively and I continue to use it for formating and editing some of the longer posts here.

Some are looking at the release of Apps Premier as a full-fledged assault on the Microsoft Office juggernaut.  Others, like myself, see Apps Premier as a nice alternative for some businesses (and I'm predicting the service to be a success).  Others, like Matt, Mandy, and Andy don't see the $50/user license as a worthwhile value (and are predicting that the service won't be a success).

The Google Operating System blog published a post addressing the comparison of Google Docs & Spreadsheets (a major component of Apps Premier) to Microsoft Office.  Unfortunately, I think the message behind the post was largely lost on the majority of the readers.  The author seems to have been trying to point out that Docs & Spreadsheets was never intended to be the same as Office:

[…] it's unfair to compare [Docs & Spreadsheets] to Microsoft Office. Even if they'll add more features (charts in Google Spreadsheets, pagination in Google Docs), the products won't try to be an imitation of a desktop product, but something that can be done on the web and takes advantage of the huge power of the web: collaboration, instant feedback, mashups, live data from the web, contextual search.

But based on the comments attached to the post, most people thought the article was trying to persuade people to believe that Google Docs & Spreadsheets was just as powerful and capable as Microsoft Office - which is just silly.  Some of the more colorful responses include these:

Google is nice for what it is, basic typing. But once you've moved on past middle school you need word, powerpoint, and especially excel. Google spreadsheet, I find, is almost useless.

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Dear clowns, Office 2007 will never be supplanted by GoogleDocs. There I said it, now get over it.

This "mom test" faff is rubbish. Word is synonymous with word processing, and any monkey with a typewriter who doesnt try to eat their mouse will have a grasp of how to use the MS office suite, in particular Word.

Perhaps if you're a primary school kid who is reviewing their first My Little Pony or Dr. Seuss novel, googledocs is for you.

Otherwise, you know you will need the functionality Office or even OOO offers to create professional documents.

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I think I'll stick with my microsoft office thank you ;-)

When you look at Google Docs & Spreadsheets for what it is, you can quite easily see the difference between the two products.  D&S, in it's current form, could never replace Microsoft Office… for all users.  But it does fill a much-needed gap for something in between.  And I think it could serve as a nice compliment to any user's need.

Office is overkill for most users.  It really is.  Sure… someone, somewhere uses all of those zillions of features and wizards.  And even small and medium-sized businesses probably don't use most of them.  That's where Google D&S could enter the picture as an inexpensive alternative.  And with it's ability to open and save Microsoft Office file formats, users wouldn't be missing the ability to share documents.  And there's nothing that prevents businesses from providing employees with special needs or responsibilities a copy of Office even if the rest of the company is using Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

But I think it has even more potential as a supplementary product to Microsoft Office.  You would be hard-pressed to find an easier way to share and collaborate on documents than Google Docs & Spreadsheets.  The built-in Office collaboration tools don't come close.  So why couldn't businesses use Docs & Spreadsheets as "collaboration central"?  Why  not use the open nature of the Internet to make sharing and editing documents in a group setting that much easier?  And since those documents are available globally - any time… any place - it makes collaboration much, much simpler.

Is it worth $50/user a year as part of Google Apps Premier?  That remains to be seen.  But there is a free version that anyone can use.  And maybe instead of trying to pit the two products against each other we should be looking at ways the two can work together.  Isn't that what the Internet is all about?