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Google Apps Refresh Sets Up Deathmatch With Microsoft: Page 4 of 6

By acknowledging this hybrid world and adjusting its strategy accordingly, Google is also shifting the focus of the deathmatch to the collaborative backbone itself. That's why the battle becomes much more about the collaborative infrastructure behind Google Apps versus Microsoft's SharePoint and Exchange. If Google can demonstrate that end users can have their cake and eat it, too (cloud-based productivity for the majority of users and Office for a handful of power users), without sacrificing collaborative or power-user capabilities -- all at palatable cost -- Google could see a breakthrough in corporate interest in Google Apps.

And while we're on the subject of sacrificing collaborative capabilities, with today's launch, the company is looking to change the rules altogether when it comes to document collaboration.

Google has a different vision of how to get people to collaborate without friction. It starts with using the Internet because that's what everyone, including mobile device users, is connected to. By relying on the Internet, you can collaborate just as easily with someone in your company as you can a customer as you can a family member.

Next comes device agnosticism. Think of how a lawyer might collaborate with a client or another lawyer on a contract. Beyond the Web, that lawyer shouldn't have to know or care what technologies the other people have access to. As collaboration crosses organizational boundaries, the Web browser becomes the most obvious universal client. It's the easiest way for two dissimilar devices to collaborate on the same document and Google is focused on making sure that a browser is all that's needed (no plug-ins either) to access Google Docs, regardless of the devices being used.

But there's one challenge. Even though most browsers (desktop, mobile, etc.) are getting more powerful in terms of their capabilities (faster JavaScript processing, better support for standards, HTML5, etc.), no two browsers are created equal. And here's where Google's engineers have been spending thousands of man-hours building what could amount to an unfair advantage for Google and Google Apps.

Rendering a Word document in full fidelity in browser is, as Google software Micah Lemonik put it, nontrivial. Lemonik knows. For the new release of Google Apps, he single-handedly rewrote the underlying data model for Google Documents (the browser-based word processing app) from the ground up. Whereas before (with Google Documents), the data model and the presentation layer (in the browser) were inextricably linked, now the two are separate. This paved the way for Lemonik to worry about how things like a Microsoft Word document gets stored with all that fidelity while his fellow engineers worry about how to render that fidelity across every major browser on every major device.

To hear Google's Warren describe the difficulties in handling the differences between Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari (not to mention any of mobile browsers) is to understand the degree to which Google is committed to making the Web work the same for everyone on every device. But for Google, it wasn't just about doing whatever heavy engineering had to be done to get the rendering right.