Google readily admits that its Spreadsheets program now lacks such features. What Google Spreadsheets and its brethren from other vendors offer is the ability for multiple users to share and edit documents simultaneously, often while chatting with one another via instant messages in adjacent windows.

Microsoft has said it will make some collaboration features available via Office Live, one of its own entries into the software-as-a-service market. It's also making collaboration a key aspect of the upcoming Office 2007 upgrade, which is due by year's end. Many of those features, however, will require companies to deploy and support additional back-end software, such as SharePoint Server 2007.