ThinkFree Online is one of the most well rounded and fully featured Office-like suites available, a free service providing more functionality than most Office users require. It offers a suite of Microsoft Office-compatible applications - Write (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet) and Show (presentation) - which have the look, feel and much of the functionality of their Microsoft counterparts. The service offers the ability to create, edit and save documents in Microsoft compatible formats.

Just as importantly, ThinkFree Online also offers 1GB of document storage space, so you can sit down at any internet-enabled computer and create documents online, or upload existing documents from your desktop, using nothing more than a web browser running on Windows, Mac or Linux. It also allows you to share and collaboratively edit documents, add comments to documents, message other users and even publish to a web page, blog or internet application.

ThinkFree also offers a desktop-based Java version as well as a Server Edition. ThinkFree Office 3 Portable Edition for U3 is designed to run straight from a USB memory stick where you can also store your documents. In Google's hands, ThinkFree poses a threat to Microsoft's domination of the desktop, online and mobility.

Should Google develop tighter integration between ThinkFree's desktop and online products, such as synchronising documents between the desktop and the online storage space, then it could have the next killer web application on its hands.

News of the talks couldn't come at a worse time for Microsoft as it releases Office 2007 - with business versions of retailing from $AU690 to $AU1150. With most of the new features aimed at large corporates using Microsoft's SharePoint mobility features, small businesses are already asking why they should upgrade from their existing versions of Office.

Google's acquisition of ThinkFree would put even greater pressure on Microsoft to make its flagship Office suite available online. Microsoft's Office Live service it's not actually Office applications such as Word and Excel online, but rather a service offering web space and collaboration tools.

Talk of acquiring ThinkFree comes only months after Google snapping up the respected online word processor Writely and combined it with Google Spreadsheets to create Google Docs & Spreadsheets. This new service lacks the polish and integration of ThinkFree Online and would seem redundant should Google acquire ThinkFree.{moscomment}

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