As a recent article article in The Register quotes Brin as saying,
“I don’t really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly,” said Brin. However distributed thin web applications allowed you to do “new and better things than the Office package and more.”
Well clearly Mr. Brin realizes the value of a web application is the fact it's on the web. This provides quite a bit of value by itself. As Office is so desktop centric and pretty document centric, porting Open Office to the web would be silly. Why? Because too much developer time would be spent web enabling the very boring and none too useful document centric features. The next generation of collaborative applications will be web focused and web centric which creates the value in and of itself.
Clearly Mr. Brin understands Google's place in the software universe. If Google suddenly buys Jotspot you will know they are quite serious about de-throning Office by changing the paradigm of collaborative work. I have long argued that the thing that is going to de-throne Office won't be a poorly made clone but rather a new way of working. Given Office's desktop/document production focus it's unlikely to make a radical shift. The MS Office product manager more than likely talks to MS Office customers about features. He doesn't talk to people who might be using an entirely different paradigm of work flow.
How does the slow bleed work? Well by capturing the customers of the neqw subversive work flow paradigm, they slowly over years bleed customers away from Office toward the new collaborative paradigm. This will take a few years (I would guess till 2018 or so) but eventually the Office market will evenutally come to resemble the mainframe market - slow, steady and a lot smaller.
