Already winning the search war, Google is now set to hit Bill Gates where it hurts: his lucractive MS Office monopoly. Google has already been nipping around the feet of Bill's cash cow by bankrolling OpenOffice development. But that open-source Microsoft Office alternative has not really been pushed - possibly because it's not in keeping with Google's vision of software as something you only use online, not parked on a PC. Now Google's assault is about to get serious, with the release of a web-based app called Google Spreadsheets, which has just gone into a limited beta trial. Expect more developments shortly, given Google's March purchase of an online word processor called Writerly, which no doubt will shortly reappear as Google Word, or similar.

In New Zealand, our Paleolithic broadband makes it difficult to imagine so-called software as a service, be it Google Spreadsheets, or Microsoft's forthcoming Office Live and Windows Live, which will follow a similar tack. But it's a certainty that it's coming, and it's a nice change that Microsoft - a good decade after it killed WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 - will again have some genuine competition in basic business apps.

Perhaps even worse news for the Microsofties is a little-covered state government development in the US state of Massachusetts. In January this year, Fortune reports, Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn mandated that all state government office documents should be saved in Open Document Format (ODF), as well as other open standards such as HTML and PDF.

Long popular with geeks, ODF makes it easy for other software, such as OpenOffice, to read documents created in Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint. But now, following Quinn's landmark move, the European Union, the state of Denmark (yes Bill, very dark and Shakespearian) is actively considering ODF.

Momentum continued to build May 3 when the International Standards Organisation (ISO) ratified ODF, and vendors including Sun and IBM (maker of Lotus Notes) pledged to include ODF support in new versions of their office software.

Microsoft already has its response in the works: a format called Open XML, which will debut with the new version of Office (Open XML is still before the ISO). And as for Quinn, he soon ran into trouble: he was accused of fiddling his travel expenses in a story leaked to the press. The CIO was cleared, but left his job soon afterwards any way ("I was becoming a lightening rod"). Quinn's little maneuver, however, could prove historic a tipping point as Microsoft prepares to defend its US$9 billion-a-year Office business.