With Google’s recent acquisition of DocVerse, a product that allows real-time online sharing and simultaneous group editing of PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents, it’s becoming more and more apparent that not only are Google and Microsoft moving towards cloud computing, but they are in fact trying to take the whole pie for themselves. 

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using individual software and storage on personal computers.  This form of computing allows people to collectively modify data simultaneously, while always having the most recent version of a particular file.  Cloud computing is a byproduct of the internet’s ability to link different services and resources together.

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What’s next for Google and Microsoft?

To really get an idea of where the two software giants are headed, let’s take a look of some of the things that have already happened as well as some of the things that can be sure to happen in the near future.

As of today, Microsoft is using 75% of its nearly 100,000 employees to work on cloud related projects.  Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, says that within a year that percentage will grow to 90%.  The implication here is that Microsoft is obviously dedicating as much of its resources as possible to dominate the future of cloud computing.

March 5^th 2009 – Google acquires DocVerse, a product that allows real-time online sharing and simultaneous group editing of Microsoft products.

In an attempt to overpower Google Apps, Microsoft is planning to make a portion of its upcoming Office 2010 a free cloud-based productivity platform.  In addition to this, Microsoft will be providing a free, online, light version of Microsoft products to Windows Live subscribers.

Google will release the free Google Chrome OS at the end of 2010, which is a cloud based operating system that stores all of your files and other data in a cloud, not on your local machine.  For more information about Google’s future agenda, click here.

Tags: cloud computing, Google, google apps, google chrome os, Microsoft, microsoft office, office 2010

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 11:32 am and is filed under Google, Internet, Microsoft, Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.