There was a lot of excitement around the recent acquisition of Writely by Google.

Writely is a web-based processing and document sharing software, a nice piece of work. Google has announced for a long time that they planned to release a web-based office suite and apparently they are building it piece by piece. They now have a great number of pieces and more to come, starting with a calendar application.

Compared to what Microsoft Office is, there is a still lot to do but chances are that Google only plan to make the essential features available to user and not a full-featured suite like Office. Since 80% of people only use 20% of Office, that should be enough to make it a serious competitor to Microsoft.

“Less is more” seems to be the Web 2.0 companies motto for building software. They all tend to make products by proposing less features and less complexity than competitors.

But that said, I’m still very curious to see how Google will make all these software integrate into a coherent suite of tools. For the moment, they are totally separated with a different look and feel and user experience. And what about their deal with Sun about OpenOffice?