Whether it is a search engine or the online application space, Microsoft has always been struggling to achieve the success it has seen with its offline application business.

But that’s about to change..

Recent announcements about Microsoft Asure, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Office Live (Office in Browser), etc.. might have sparked a few high level meetings and strategic discussions at Google and other companies who offer similar products.

The new office is expected to hit the market in the late 2009 or early 2010, which still leaves these companies with some time to try and grab more share of online productivity applications before Microsoft launches its applications and aggressively sells it.

I think eventually Microsoft will gain a considerable lead in the online office space because it has a strategic advantage of being the industry leader in offline productivity tools and that’s exactly what companies like Google or Zoho lack an offline application which integrates with online office for seamless transition.

While I agree that the future of technology is in the clouds I totally refuse to accept that offline applications will play less or no role in future technologies. I believe the future is all about collaboration, while offline applications will become lightweight as online technologies allow developers to create more sophisticated cloud applications.

This is exactly where Microsoft has the advantage, it already has a wonderful suit office applications offline all it needs to do now is create its online counterpart and integrate it. If that is done, why would anyone maintain multiple accounts for storing documents?

Just imagine an upload option in your MS Word applications which uploads the documents to a Google Docs like platform which lets your create collaboratively and publish universally. Things will be so much easier.

A good example for this would be Google’s Picasa, how many of us actively maintain Flickr or Photobucket accounts when you can export and share pictures on picasaweb with a click of a button.

Office applications that will be made available online are MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote supported by Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

I really want to see how Microsoft plays this, whether will it be defensive and try to match Google docs or other online services or be attacking and offer much more than these services currently offer.

Can’t wait to see what they have to offer..