First off, as expected, Google has launched its highly anticipated PowerPoint knock - oops, was that my outside voice. I mean Google has launched its highly anticipated presentation software application and added it to its Docs & Spreadsheets feature (which is nothing like Word and Excel - wink!)

It's free. It's web-based making it optimal for collaboration and convenient access. And, you can upload your old Office docs to mix and mingle with your account.

If you want to read the ra-ra version of what's going on, here's the press release from Google. If you want to watch the ra-ra version of what's going on, here's Google's video tour of their now rounded out office application suite.

But wait there's more!

Also this week, for those of you as long in the tooth as I, remember Lotus 1 2 3 which begat Lotus Symphony from IBM? Like the VW bug and hip huggers, it too is back. IBM has launched a new open source version of Lotus Symphony that will also give Microsoft major headaches.

Lotus Symphony is a suite of office tools to create, you guessed it, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It supports Windows and Linux and, it too, is free. Help yourself at their download page.

Because it is open source, developers will love integrating it with existing systems. If you want to read more about open source, check out my open source primer recently published on this site.