"94% of Americans have never tried an online productivity suite"

In 1991, 94% of Americans had never tried a PC productivity suite. They must have been doomed, too.

Seriously. Online productivity suites are, what, two years old now? (Writely launched in October 2005.) If good software takes ten years[1], we're 20% of the way there.

For god's sake, people, have some patience, and enjoy the bleeding edge while it lasts! In 2020, complaints about the performance of online apps are going to sound as quaint as my complaint about my first hard drive does today. (I paid $400 for 80 lousy megabytes in 1990. I can barely even type that, it sounds so unbelieveable now.)

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html

I think this is a really good point. The first liquid fueled rockets didn't fly nearly as high as solid fuel ones either.

That said the handful employees I know at google use MS office. That seems odd to me.

MS Office is a better application overall unless you need a specific feature of Google Docs like "free," "no install," and "easier to collaborate remotely." None of these apply at a big company.

A PC productivity suite's main competition was pen and paper. An online productivity suite is similar (by design) to existing PC applications. One must be a PC user before an Internet user.

Yes, there is a market, and it's growing, but it's not going to make the next Microsoft until somebody discovers as big a value add as MS Office was to pen and paper.