Tastes Great! Less filling! NYT, Blodget, Don Dodge – lots of words flew around over the weekend about Google taking on Microsoft and more specifically the false dichotomy of fully web-based productivity apps (Google) vs. partially web-based productivity apps (Microsoft). What’s this false dichotomy, you say? In the interest of plotting a compelling storyline, journalists are casting this Manichean competition between tech giants as the software equivalent of the Boeing Dreamliner / Airbus A380, bet-the-company directional prediction about the future of commercial aviation. This is not an accurate analog because, in this case, there is a full grayscale in between. On the one side, we’ve got Google Docs, all AJAX, all online. On the other, Word, all client-side and off-line. In effect, Google Gears and the forthcoming offline functions slated for Firefox 3 will pull Google Docs down onto the desktop. Office Live, Web-Access, Software Plus Service, whatever they’re calling it these days, will push Word up in to the cloud. I know that behind the scenes, both these products will end up in the same place because there is already a product and technology platform pointing the way to the future: Buzzword, the online word processor built in Flash. In effect, when you load Buzzword, you’re downloading the app – just jess persistently than you might download a desktop app. As you type your document in Buzzword, which you’ve just downloaded, an XML payload shuttles data back and forth. Is it a stretch to imagine the progression from Word syncing when you ‘export to the web’ to Word syncing with each letter you type as Buzzword does? Is it a stretch to imagine Google Docs and Firefox getting heavier and heavier, demanding more and more resources from your local machine? The battle for supremacy will, in reality, come down to the refinement and perfection of feature-set and user experience – and not to a large directional bet made now.