Microsoft counterattacked Google with the announcement that Office 2010 will have a freeversion online. Poor Google Docs.

The war among the two companies is worse and worse. When Bill Gates forces put in the air Bing, Mountain View army answered with Google Wave. It was a way to obscure the arrival of the first decent searcher developed bt Microsoft and of saying to them “Look how their weapons are outdated!”. Some weeks passed and the generals Larry Page and Sergey Brin shot Google Chrome. Days later other bomb from the clouds, Office 2010.

Difficult to say who began the battle. Was Google Docs the first provocation? Or was Live Search that led off the confrontation, many years ago? As in the conflict among Israelis and Palestinian, the two sides think are with the reason. The Google developers see each other better as the soldiers prepared. And the one of Microsoft, also. Now, the two sides pondered in showing that get to overcome their opponents. It is a road without turn, a digital cold war.

The fact is that the many internet users in the planet still doesn’t use any online suite of applications . The small portion that makes that becomes separated mainly among Google Docs, Zoho and Thinkfree. The force of the name Office certainly can implode the three with just one shot: millions of people and companies should embark in the initiative of Microsoft if it works well. That doesn’t mean that those older rivals will stop existing. But certainly they will be hurt. On the other side of the front, the power of the mark Google has also been impeding Bing of taking off.

Somebody will rise and to say: “All competition is beneficial for the consumer and that war will only bring benefits”. Even if could, would last for just a short period. Google and Microsoft are acting in a number every time larger of fronts. That tends the to grow more and more, taking both companies loosing the focus in what that they know do better. With that, everybody will come out losing.

Via: CrunchGear and Microsoft.