Google (GOOG) officially unleashes online Microsoft (MSFT) PowerPoint competitor

It's been a long time coming, but Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) "Presentation" web-based presentation application is now available. As always, some are billing it as a "PowerPoint killer," which is Microsoft, Inc. (NASDAQ: MSFT)'s ubiquitous presentation software that is the lifeblood of business people all over the globe. Google's already unleashed its word processor and spreadsheet software to the masses (as well as email services, of course), so the presentation portion of the Google Apps package was eagerly awaited, if for nothing more than fodder for comparison to Microsoft's PowerPoint by the media.

Much like the freely available OpenOffice software suite, Google Presentation can import and use Microsoft PowerPoint files, has built-in themes, text formatting and so forth. Google Presentation, of course, has built-in online collaboration and sharing, which is something many PowerPoint users probably would love to see instead of having multiple versions of the same presentation floating around on the corporate server somewhere. Google's connective collaboration is the single-largest jump it has over locally installed software packages. On features, however, it lags behind. But, would a customer rather have tons and tons of rarely used features or a way to have a team contribute to a single presentation, even if they were dispersed all over the globe?

E-mailing a link to an online presentation is a great feature of Google's new Presentation offering, although services like WebEx have done this with PowerPoint for years. But, emailing a link instead of having folks login to a secure website is a tad easier on all concerned, right? Once Google Presentation gets out in the wild during the rest of this year, the pundits will surely answer that question. We'll be listening.