Google reportedly ready to launch web-based spreadsheet

Google is expected to launch a web-based spreadsheet application, a move that would be the search engine giant's latest challenge to Microsoft.

The Google Spreadsheet would follow by a couple of months the company's purchase of Writely, a web-based word processor, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Google was not immediately available for comment.

Writely and the spreadsheet application are direct challenges to Microsoft's worker productivity software. The Office suite dominates the desktop market, but its future could very well be as a web service.

Microsoft has said it intends to make Office and many of its other products available over the web as part of its Windows Live initiative.

Google has aggressively challenged Microsoft on the desktop, which has traditionally been the software maker's strongest market.

Last month, Google announced a deal with computer maker Dell, which agreed to ship 10s of million of computers with Google software installed. The products included Google's search application for scouring a computer hard drive and emails, and a web browser toolbar linking to Google's online search engine and other services.

Advertising linked to online search is a multi-billion-dollar market that Google currently dominates. Microsoft, however, is spending heavily on search to capture a larger share of online advertising dollars.

Google has no plan for its own web browser

Google has no plans to build its own web browser software to compete with rival Microsoft, chief executive Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday.

During a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Schmidt dismissed speculation that the company aimed to tie together its web search and other services to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the world's dominant web browser.

"It looks like people have some good browser choices already," Schmidt said. "We would not build a browser for the fun of building a browser," he added.

Google encourages its customers to use a variety of alternatives to Internet Explorer, particularly the open-source Firefox browser.

It also has partnerships to encourage the use of the Safari browser among Apple customers, Norway's Opera Software ASA, which makes browsers for computers and phones, among several other browser alternatives, he said.

However, Schmidt left the door open to developing a browser if it saw some clear utility to users that was not otherwise being met in the market. "We would only do something ... if we thought there was a real end-user benefit," he said.

The Google executive has consistently downplayed questions about its ambitions to develop its own browser software by saying that the underlying assumption is that Google is taking up the battle that web browser pioneer Netscape Communications lost to Microsoft during the 1990s.

Schmidt argues that the landscape of the computer industry has been changed by the dynamics of web search advertising and the decade-old "battle for the desktop" waged by Microsoft and its competitors is quickly becoming less relevant.