Google too nimble for Ballmer

While Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last week was busy defending lackluster Vista sales and reigniting vague Yahoo rumors, he also spent time slamming Google and its Google Apps competitor to Office. Ballmer derided Apps' "flat" adoption rate and lack of feature set. But while the ink had yet to dry on the several press accounts of the tirade, Google quickly and quietly tweaked apps to counter Ballmer's argument.

At a talk before thousands of IT professionals at Gartner's annual expo on Thursday of last week, Ballmer slammed Apps this way:

“Let’s look at facts. Nobody uses those things[Apps], and the usage data hasn’t grown in seven months. If you look at the ComScore, it’s just like this: It’s just a flat line. You can’t even put a footnote in a document.”

The "flat line" portion of the comment has been confirmed by a comScore representative, who characterized Ballmer's statement as "generally accurate." But Google itself hit back at Ballmer on the feature set portion. In just one day, Google added a footnote feature to Apps, with users able to access and use it on Friday. In the real world, footnoting is a dubious feature to wrangle over--how many people actually use it in their day-to-day documents?--but the speed of the addition was what counts. Apps may not be quite as feature-rich as Word (and most of it users actually prefer it that way), but it can turn on a dime and add features as its user base requires. And that's not something Microsoft can do with its bloated desktop approach to Office productivity software.

• Microsoft
• Software
• Features
• footnotes
• Gartner
• Google
• Google Apps
• Microsoft
• Steve Ballmer
• Vista
• Yahoo