With the announcement of “Office Web Applications,” Microsoft has finally joined the battle of web applications. Microsoft has announced that it will introduce the browser-based versions of the major MS Office components – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote – in the next release of MS Office. Microsoft claims that these will be “lightweight versions” and will provide full features and rich functionality. The IT industry is taking this announcement as a challenge for Google Docs. Will Microsoft be able to challenge Google?

Richard MacManus on the ReadWriteWeb blog has written about the browser version of MS Office. He writes in his post, Microsoft Office Comes to the Browser (Finally), that MS Word is still the foremost choice of people for word processing and its browser version will be a great success. He further writes:

 Microsoft has just announced its intensions and it is being expected that the product will be released in late 2009 or early 2010. Currently, it’s too early to comment on the performance of Office Web Applications and difficult to compare it with Google Docs. In his post, Microsoft Office Will Float to the Cloud with Office Web, David Chartier believes this strategy of Microsoft will work.

 Due to the growing popularity of web apps and collaboration tools, Microsoft’s decision to capture this market seems quite timely. If Microsoft successfully delivers the feature-enriched, lightweight version of MS Office then it will definitely kick out its competitors, Google Docs and Zoho. But we have to wait until the release of Office Web Applications to see the future of Google Docs.