Mountain View, California — Sharply responding to Microsoft’s recently announced online Office 2010, search engine titan Google Inc. has its developers involved over at Google Docs, where the company claims it is working on a "shiny new interface" for Google Docs — in an attempt to deliver a counter-punch to Microsoft’s Office Web Applications.
While the work is in progress, on the Official Google Docs blog, Google posted an entry with the headline "Pardon our Dust". Nevertheless, this is Google’s way of expressing that change is on the way, with a brand new interface due to appear on Google Docs in short order.
Well, it is hardly surprising to see Google making a ‘pre-announcement’ announcement on the Google Docs Blog, which comes hot-on-the-heels of Microsoft unveiling its plans for Office 2010.
However, Google has not revealed much details of what is coming on Google Docs, but has informed users that ongoing tweaks might be noticeable during the "next few weeks" while it applies the facelift to Docs.
The company’s techies are already busy tinkering with the sharing menus, but claims that bigger changes are afoot.
"Over the next few weeks you will see a number of small changes, culminating in a brand new shiny interface," products manager, Vijay Bangaru, claims on the Google Docs blog. He adds that the company has some "pretty exciting features" in the pipeline, without elaborating further.
Google’s Bangaru explains that the first perceptible change will be the disappearance of the "Shared with…" on the left side of the Google Docs home page. Google reassures that this feature is not going away, it is simply being moved over to another place. It says to click on the "Search Options" button instead, and then type in a user’s name to see what documents you have shared with them.
"We feel this is a big improvement over the old one; we have moved all the sharing functionality into this one dialog, so now you can completely manage sharing without having to leave the Docs list," said Bangaru. Additionally, the web kingpin has added a few "search operators" to Docs.
Google Docs has often been criticized for its lack of features compared to the full-blown desktop software packages such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice that it one day hopes to replace.
Microsoft released Office 2010 for testing early this week, but a technical preview of its web-based brother, which will be made freely available to individuals and organizations, has not landed yet.
Despite that, a pushy Google is keen to make a play into the Office arena, promising that their redesign will make sharing more intuitive, even where Microsoft holds a vast ground with a huge 90 per cent chunk of the global market share.