Google - the Mother of Invention
Google finally started its war on MS - atleast it seems so.Google recently revealed its version of the Spreadsheet program - an important ingredient of MS's Office Suite of products. Though as of now, the application is more like a spreadsheet collaboration tool for the web. Using the tool, users can share spreadsheets online and make changes/additions so that the data remains consistent. Also, users don't need to store these spreadsheets on their machines - they can be stored on the Google servers!!! This service is a Beta version as of now, so it doesn't have those many functionalities. But they will be added soon - Google can be trusted on that. Its currently open only by invitations - check it out at: http://spreadsheets.google.com
Some time back, there were rumours about Google coming up with a new architecture that would allow users to directly login into a network, without an OS. I think this is Google's first move towards accomplishing the mission.
While browsing through Google Labs, I also came across Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends). This is also in the Beta version, but has the potential to become an extremely powerful tool for Marketing people. It takes as input two items (commodities) and displays a graph listing the times the items were searched for on Google as a percentage of total searches on Google. It also shows the number of times the items were in use; also highlighting major news events at the peaks of the graph.