Update: Microsoft has now announced the worldwide availability of Office 2010 and Sharepoitn 2010. See all the details here.

Also, Microsoft has a response to Google's claims here (thanks Pradeep).

Original Article: As enterprise users of Microsoft Office prepare to upgrade, Google has a message for them, and that message is "upgrade with Google." The company posted the message on its Enterprise blog today.

"This week Microsoft will take its Office 2010 suite out of beta," says Google Enterprise Product Management Director Matthew Glotzbach. "If you're considering upgrading Office with Office, we'd encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs. If you choose this path, upgrade means what it’s supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity. This is a refreshing alternative to the expensive and laborious upgrades to which IT professionals have become accustomed."

"Of course, you probably already own Office 2003 or 2007 (or maybe Office 2000?), and there’s no need to uninstall them. Fortunately, Google Docs also makes Office 2003 and 2007 better," says Glotzbach. "For example, you can store any file – including Microsoft Office documents – in Google’s cloud and share them in their original format (protected, naturally by Google’s synchronous replication across datacenters). Plus, in the coming months, Google will enable real-time collaboration directly in Office 2003 and 2007, as you can see here."

He provides the following chart, and references Microsoft's own TechNet articles.


Last week Google announced that more Google applications such as Blogger, Picasa, Reader, AdWords, etc. would be coming to Google Apps customers. Of course in March, the company unveiled the Google Apps Marketplace, a place developers can add various applications that integrate with Google Apps.