Google Docs Has Data Defenciency Says Microsoft - The UpStream

I bet most of you forgot about Google Docs but the good news is that Google didn't, or did they? Google acquired the company DocVerse in an effort to create a more Microsoft Office like software suite based on cloud computing. Recently, the director of Microsoft's online product management team, Alex Payne made the argument that Google Docs isn't something that should be used to replace or augment Microsoft Office. When you use Google Docs to convert Office files you lose data consistency such as page breaks, charts, SuperArt and more. To prove his point he gave a demonstration that can be watched below. To explain why consistency issues do not arise when copying Office files to Office Web Apps Payne stated,

If you have a document that was created in Office and you upload it to our Office web apps (Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote) the document will look almost identical when you view it in the browser (IE, Firefox and Safari) *and* we maintain the components in the doc even if you don't see them in the Web.

Hit the break for a quote from Google and a video about the service.

Google countered this statement by noting that the refresh they gave Google Docs last month will confront those issues and they will continue to improve as they develop DocVerse and integrate it with Google Docs. A Google rep made a statement saying,

It says a lot about Microsoft's approach to customer lock-in that the company touts its proprietary document formats, which only Microsoft software can render with true fidelity, as the reason to avoid using other products.

This is very characteristic for Google to make claims concerning products that are under developed and not widely used. Perhaps it was something to do with their, release now and fix later philosophy of product and service development. Microsoft has a much better position to defend and if DocVerse ever has a chance at biting into Microsoft Office's market share they better start thinking first and speaking later.