There's been a lot of talk on the net about Google's Eric Schmidt announcing that a presentation manager (PowerPoint-like) web application that will be available within a few months. The hype is that the Google Docs (word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation manager) will be an Office killer. I was there along with thousands of other people at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote presentation yesterday when Schmidt showed a few plain slides of black text on a white background before making the announcement. And, I think that most of the hype in the news is just that: hype. When John Battelle asked Schmidt point-blank if the Google Docs trio is an Office-killer, the response was a clear and simple: No. Schmidt said that the web applications do not have the full range of features of Microsoft office and is not a competitor.

I like and use Google Docs a lot (daily). But, I would never consider it to be a replacement for Microsoft Word and Excel. OpenOffice.org is closer in features to Microsoft Office and has not made much of a dent either despite its low price of entry (free). Google Docs, on the other hand, does not need to compete with Office to be successful. I think it has a great nitch as a complementary application. I, for example, have been keeping my conference notes in Google Docs and exporting them to Word doc format as a "backup" (quite a switch, eh?). But, do keep an eye on Google's presentation manager. I'm sure it will change the way we collaborate and share presentations in the near future.