TechNayak(mirror)

There were speculations, and predictions but it finally happened. Google has just acquired Tonic systems and their presentation suite to add to its office automation app. With this acquisition, GOffice seems to be a big reality and with Google Apps for domains being offered to SME’s there might very well be a shift towards online office automation.
  Everything aside, the news wasn’t totally unexpected and MS doesn’t need to fret as yet. I recently met a lot of folk who were still new to the 2.0 trend aka the enterprise folk. When I tried talking them into the benefits of the 2.0 to businesses, there was clear repulsion. Why? You don’t let your data out of your office. Thats where the online office space fever begins to wear out and people come back to dear old Earth. Documents, spreadsheets etc are critical to a business, some documents carry the entire fate of their companies. Internal memo’s , financial results, upcoming projects, new technology and project metrics are some of the most commonly created/used documents and trust me, office folk are not comfortable with Google hosting the files out of their office.
   Whats working against Google is also their branding, which has been clearly towards search and advertising. The minute you mention google behind your data, people are worried that your data is being crawled for content and mined and instances like the Notebook controversy doesn’t help. Instead if Google could give provisions to keep data internal to the systems creating it, there could be some stir with the MS Office folks.
   I see a lot of blogs asking MS to wake up, I say, take it easy. It takes more than a fancy set of apps to move a giant.