Google's Office rival expands language support

Angus Kidman
Thursday, 08 February 2007 02:49

Business IT - Technology

Google has upped the ante in its ongoing battle to win converts from Microsoft's Office suite to its own Internet-based alternatives, adding a dozen extra languages to its Google Docs & Spreadsheets product.

In a posting on Google's official blog, associate product marketing manager Kevin Systrom announced that the word processor product (based on the Writely system acquired by Google last year) and the internally developed spreadsheet are now available in a dozen new European and Asian languages.

Perhaps the most significant additions are Simplified and Traditional Chinese, which give Google access to the potentially huge but largely untapped Chinese market. Other additions include Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Google has been promoting the notion of online office suites, where documents can be accessed from any Web browser and shared between different users. So far, it hasn't charged for the products -- arguably a sensible move given that the range of functions offered is still much smaller than those found in PC-based alternatives such as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.

Interestingly, Systrom suggested that the only difference between the US and the UK language variants was the spelling of the word 'colour'. This implies that the localisation doesn't extend to the help documentation, but in fact it does, with words like 'organise' appearing in the correct UK spelling on that version of the service.