UnixPoet

I do not think that Google has an Office in mind. At all.

First off, Writely, even a souped up version full of Google steriods, will still remain the Wordpad to the Visual Studio that is Office. Google is not dumb enough to do a full frontal on Microsoft Office - the way to beat Office is to make it irrelevant. And Writely does not really even to begin to do that.

What Google above all is an advertising company selling targeted ads. It needs to know its users in detail - the more it knows the better. And what better way to learn about someone then looking at their email, the IM, the news they are interested, the blogs they read, and the documents they write?

Google will offer Writely and GDrive so that it has more info to analyse about the users; the aim is to not to kill Office - that’s just a nice bonus. Google does not care if you use Office Word - but it does care that you keep it on GDrive.

Indeed, in the grander scheme of things, the more important announcement from Google is not Writely but GDrive.

Is it a wonder that the latest Google Desktop (which is great btw) saves documents on Google servers? Indeed it fits in nicely with my hypothesis