It’s Friday so when you run out of invites you have to fall back on the old standby, unsubstantiated rumor. In this case, the rumors comes from our friends in Mountain View, Google. The Inquirer purports that we should all prepare ourselves for an upcoming PowerPoint “killer”. Lets look at this a bit more deeply.

Presently

From The Inquirer,

“Called Presently, the slideshow program is likely to be based in part on code Google bought through the acquisitions of Zenter and Tonic Systems earlier this year.

Google had a bit of a coup last week when it said that ancient white-collar services group Capgemini will push Google Apps. Presently will be a near certainty to go into that suite, alongside web-based WP, spreadsheet and communications tools.”

Web 2.0 Roundup

The biggest question is whether an online app will ever “feel right” to those who are serious PowerPoint users. We can’t forget that children are brought up using PowerPoint, and as any enterprise software company will tell you — if you can manage to get them young, they will likely be life long users. This is why everything from Vista to Autocad is offered at cut rate prices for schools and students.

This is not even taking into account how “scary” the idea of cloud computing seems to a lot of people. Google already has its share of privacy concerns, the thought of importing important presentations into le indexer finale may not sit well with security conscience.

If Google is able to make this coup, however, it will finally be in the position to get a foothold in the desktop market. It’s a risk worth taking, especially when that “risk” really only amounts to splicing together properties that are already in their portfolio. If this rumor is true, we might be nearing a tipping point in the battle for desktop dominance.

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