In a steady march across internet territory, Google are slowly introducing competing services to take on anybody and everybody.
First came the Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Hotmail killer GMail, with unheard of online storage capacity. Google then bought out Blogger, one of the most well-used Blogger community sites. The addition of Blogger provided Google not only with a large user community, but it also added the capability to catalog and index the ever growing and changing ‘blogsphere’ (similarly to their purchase of DejaNews back in 2001, which had a UseNet newsgroup archive going back several years, and now rebadged as Google Groups).
Beating Microsoft out of the door with an online office webapp, Google Spreadsheets allows uses to edit, save and share onliner spreadsheets, possibly beating Microsoft at their own game and beating them to market before the launch of Microsoft Live, which is supposed to offer the same online office apps (although Google have yet to offer word processing and presentation software online).
Google’s latest, Google Checkout, now offers online vendors and consumers a PayPal alternative, which the benefit of one-click checkout across any online store supporting the new service.