“We don’t call it an office suite. It’s not an office suite.”

— In 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt denies the company is planning an assault on Microsoft Office.

This is amusing–if only because Google insisted for so long that it doesn’t have designs on Microsoft’s core PC software business. Discussing Google Docs and the company’s other productivity offerings with ZDNet Asia, Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division, volunteered that most businesses will have the opportunity to “get rid of [Microsoft] Office if they chose to” in a year.

“We wouldn’t ask people to get rid of Microsoft Office and use Google Docs because it is not mature yet,” Girouard said. But once it is and Google’s finishes with the 30+ features and performance updates it has planned for the office suite in the next year, the company will no doubt ask just that.

And when Google (GOOG) does, what will happen to Microsoft (MSFT)? Not to worry, Redmond, there will still be a place for your Office business in Google’s new software-as-a-service empire. Said Girouard: “I don’t think Office will entirely disappear.”

[Image credit: Flickr/FF2D]

Seems that Google (GOOG) has finally realized that it wasn’t doing itself any favors in enterprise by essentially advertising Apps as an immature product suite. IT managers are easily spooked at the mention of the word “beta.”

“We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase,” Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management for Google Enterprise, wrote in a post to the company blog. “So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.”

That mark presumably being the point at which Google is ready to guarantee uptime and reliability to end users….

If the Web has a single point of failure, you’d think it was Google, given the outcry over the the outages suffered by some of the company’s services Thursday. Something went wrong this morning and whatever it was had widespread effects on a broad spectrum of Google services–Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google News, Blogger, Google Analytics, Google Docs. It outraged Twitter users and provided Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live Search team with no end of amusement. “Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine,” it quipped in a tweet.

The source of the disruption? A system error that sent a bunch of Google (GOOG) Web traffic to Asia and waylaid about 14 percent of it, apparently.

This just in from the Google Blog:

“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.”

Salesforce.com will be acquired in 2007. We believe the growing importance of online delivery of software and business services will make Salesforce.com (and particularly its AppExchange hub) a very tempting target to both large players (like IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft) still struggling to scale down and move online, and consumer-heavy players (like Google, Yahoo, AOL) trying to ’scale up’ to the business market as a way to further monetize their online presence.”

–IDC Predictions 2007

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (photo, right) wasn’t kidding when he said in May of 2007, “We’re the Google of business.” The customer-relationship software pioneer this morning announced an alliance with Google (GOOG) that will see it integrating Google’s online services into the Salesforce.com (CRM) platform.

Christened Salesforce for Google Apps, the offering embeds Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs directly into Salesforce.com’s core sales force automation, marketing and customer-service applications.

The partnership is quite an endorsement of business-workspace applications delivered from the cloud. It’s also an aggressive move against Microsoft’s (MSFT) Dynamics Live CRM, Redmond’s customer relationship management software, which is integrated with its Office suite.

Together Google and Salesforce.com are clearly seeking to challenge Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar Office franchise. As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, told the New York Times, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend.” And perhaps even a potential acquirer.

The availability of an offline component for Google Docs might not convince businesses to standardize on Google Apps, but it will undoubtedly get them thinking about it a bit more. Certainly, Docs’ lack of offline access has been one of the biggest objections to the Web-hosted application. Allowing Docs users to work on their word processing documents without an Internet connection, gives them one less reason to export them to Microsoft Word.