Google has launched its Docs & Spreadsheets, beating the launch of Zoho's Office Suite by one day. The online text editing service that Google acquired in early 2006, Writely, is now being re-branded, combined with Google Spreadsheets, and integrated into Google's offensive attack against Microsoft's expensive Office product. The domain name writely.com now redirects visitors to docs.google.com.

Personally, I would have liked to see Google spruce up its design for these services a little, but instead of keeping the typical Web 2.0 look that Writely had, they decided to stay with their battle tested, simplistic blue design. What this means is fast load times and pages containing a single image - the Google logo.

Among the various features offered is the ability to save your documents as PDF files, something very efficient and useful for folks who don't have a program that enables them to do so. Google has assembled key pieces of an online office suite that, along with its other offerings, complement each other very well. As Internet becomes more and more accessible everywhere a person goes, Google's products stand a very good chance of standing up against the market dominance of Microsoft Office.

In a couple years, we might look back and remember the old days when we had to use Microsoft Office to create documents, and email them to ourselves to access them elsewhere.