Google has just announced that they have acquired Tonic Systems, a company which has already been developing in this area, with the aim of releasing in the summer. According to a post on the Google Blog (incidentally by Sam Schillace, who we interviewed previously for the podcast):

We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

This is no surprise; they are building a comprehensive online office suite, and presentations were always going to be an integral part of that. As Sam put it in the post, presentations are well suited to collaboration.

It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them.

I disagree with Arrington. He does not believe Schmidt’s comment at the Web 2.0 Expo that he does not believe that Google Office competes with Microsoft’s product is genuine. I do think the comment is genuine; Google really does see their product as a collaboration tool, rather than a traditional MS Office equivalent. They’ve taken the very sensible view that rather than create a rubbish traditional office suite by using a technology not really appropriate, they will create a product that does one thing, collaboration, extremely well, without trying to compete against Microsoft, whose desktop application will always be able to provide more features.

Read/WriteWeb has the story that Microsoft have launched a technology preview version of Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe’s Flash technology.

Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe’s launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight – a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). In its announcement, Microsoft describes Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. So basically it is Microsoft’s equivalent to Adobe’s Flash.

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