Last week I tested the new Microsoft Office 2007. It is the first major upgrade in the world's most used office work system. I think it is clearly a step forward in user interfaces. However, the relearning will be expensive and frustrating for most users. Also, I think that the new document formats can very well be a costly mistake for Microsoft, because much of Office's dominance has to do with "doc" and "xls" file formats being de facto standards.
I can sum up my impression of Office 2007 as "cool, but slightly off-target". Why off-target? Because the actual problem people face nowadays when they work in documents, has more to do with sharing and collaborating, than finding sophisticated features.
Enter Google Docs & Spreadsheets, with collaborate, sync and "always" available. In many ways, Google is revolutionizing the way people work and communicate.
The revolution started with GMail and its awesome 2 Gigabytes of free storage, at a time where equivalent services offered 1000 times less, just around 2 Megabytes. Then Google Earth created a global view of earth like no other computer application before it. Then more applications followed: Google pages (100 Mb), Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets. With Google Docs & Spreadsheets you can create and easily share documents with specific users or with everybody. You can also simultaneously edit the document.
The concept is great, and makes way for the Desktop of the future. However, I think, before it can become a reality, something new on the client-side will have to appear. Something between a web browser and a Java applet container, that keeps the simplicity of web development, adds persistent local storage and built-in AJAX-like primitives.
However, there is a dark side to Google (and all similar web applications from other companies): remember, you don't know where your data is being stored. Assume that everything you do with Google can be read by someone else. About Google (and all other similar web applications), I quote Scott McNealy:
"You have zero privacy. Get over it."
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