Although existing enterprise application vendors are likely to make light of Google's latest move to release an enterprise edition of GoogleDocs, there seems to be a lot of ancedotal evidence that shows that GoogleDocs is becoming a preferred collaboration tool for the average end user regardless of what IT professionals in their organizations have to say about the matter.
There's no doubt that GoogleDocs is not as secure a collaboration environment as say SharePoint from Microsoft, but the two things that GoogleDocs has going for it are that it is a whole lot easier to set up and for all intents and purposes is priced right, especially for companies that are hamstrung by limited IT budgets.
In fact, GoogleDocs as a business tool has been growing in popularity pretty steadily, so the release of an enterprise edition is just Google's way of formally telling Microsoft that yet another one of its longtime bastions in under siege. For its part, Microsoft will be quick to point out all the great things you can do with Microsoft Office that you can't do with GoogleDocs, but a big part of its problem going forward is that less than 20 percent of the people using personal productivity applications care about 80 percent of the features in Microsoft Office.
What most people want is a simple-to-use suite of collaboration applications. Microsoft intends to try to provide that capability by delivering Office Live, which is essentially a Web-based implementation of SharePoint. That's a nice idea, but Microsoft is trying to contain the software-as-a-service movement by saying that Office Live is really targeted at small business users rather then traditional enterprise customers. The trouble with that approach to marketing Office Live is that it assumes that users in the enterprise are living in a cave where the only access to what is happening in the broader IT landscape is provided by their IT people. The truth of the matter is that more often than not IT people are scrambling to keep up with users that push the IT envelope on a daily basis by accessing more and more software-as-a service offerings.
This doesn't mean that software-as-a-service is going to completely supplant everything, but it sure does mean that Microsoft has fallen significantly behind the times inside and outside the enterprise, and once that happens, it becomes extremely difficult to reverse the tide of end user behavior that is increasingly moving away from Microsoft.