For those of you who aren’t on the cutting edge of everything Google releases (how could you possible keep up?!), it may be a bit of surprise to learn that Google is taking on Microsoft with its release of Google Docs - a free alternative to Microsoft Office.

While this service has been available for a while now and is being used by a lot of Google fanatics, it seems to me that it has just recently really started to catch on with mainstream users…and there are good reasons why.

1. Google Docs now has viable alternatives for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.  For 90% of the professional workers of the world - that’s enough.
2. Google Docs are leveraged by Google’s online resources, making them very easy to share with others and automatically backed up to one of Google’s secure data centers.  Two great benefits that can be a real pain to achieve with Microsoft’s products.
3. They’ve made it very easy to save Google Docs in Microsoft’s formats, making it pretty painless to share with your friend that still uses Microsoft Office.
4. They are FREE!

Now, before we get too excited, many businesses have tried to take on Microsoft in this arena and lost.  Do you remember Star Office from Sun?  Of course you don’t.

But I don’t think anyone with Google’s resources or gravitas in the business community has done this before, and Google seems pretty intent on winning this war.

Can they really do it?  My bet is that they will own a pretty good junk of the marketplace within the next few years.  People hate paying Microsoft’s ever-growing licensing fees, and most people don’t know how to use any of the fancy new features anyway.  Google Docs will be hard to beat at the price/benefit ratio it currently has, and really difficult if they continue to improve upon what they’ve already created.

We’ve started to see may of our small business IT support customers at Everon start to consider using Google Docs rather than paying for Office.  The start of a massive trend?  Time will tell.