GOffice - what's the big deal?

It is not a surprise that Google officially launched Google Apps Premier which is a bundled package of their hosted offerings for word processing, spreadsheets, email, calendaring, and instant messaging.  I wrote about this in the fall of 2004 when Adam Bosworth joined Google from Microsoft and wrote a lengthy blog post on the web-based platform.  Google has clearly been executing on this vision over the last two years, but I do not see this as a Microsoft killer.  While I am huge fan of web-based software and data in the cloud, there is one big problem - you always need to be connected.  For the last two weeks I have been living in a web-based world as I had to send my laptop back for service.  While I could do everything I needed to do, I must admit I was about 60% as productive as usual.  This lack of productivity partly came from clicking and waiting in my web-based Exchange offering and partly due to lots of travel which meant I could do absolutely nothing on the airplane.  What I see Google Apps doing is breaking the market into two segments - those who want to easily share and collaborate information with others in a lightweight manner and the power users who live, eat, and breathe in their productivity applications.  I certainly see myself using Google Spreadsheets to post some information on my blog but it will be a long time, before I even think about replacing my desktop productivity applications. In the meantime all of this is great for consumers as competition is forcing Microsoft to rethink their whole application strategy by incorporating a SAAS component into most of their offerings.  I can only assume that Microsoft will get better at this and make it easier for their users to work online and offline in a seamless manner.  In my web-based world, disconnected applications with an online component will rule.  Let's see what the Adobe Apollo platform brings to the world later this year.