Good Morning Silicon Valley

Right now, it might be tough to see any one competitor putting a serious dent in the dominance of Microsoft Office, but turn it into a gang fight and who knows what could happen. As the news this week shows, the Redmond giant is beset by a growing pack of challengers for its enterprise productivity business, and the only bright spot for Microsoft is the accumulation of fresh evidence for its antitrust defense. Here’s the latest:

* As hinted at last week (see “Charges against Google’s Office killer knocked down to first-degree assault“), Google today added the ability to create PowerPoint-like slide shows to its online productivity suite, the name of which has been mercifully shortened to Google Docs. In unveiling Google Presentations, the search sovereign pushed hard at the major advantage that the program and the rest of its apps have over the deskbound Office — real-time collaboration. “From student groups to sales teams, people are turning to the Web for help improving both personal and group productivity,” Sam Schillace, director of engineering for Google Docs, said in a statement. “Putting documents in the cloud surrounded by easy to use features for collaboration and sharing can save people hours of inefficiency and frustration and even enable new ways of working together.”

* While Google attacked from the clouds, IBM launched a ground assault on Office, announcing it will offer as a free download its own version of OpenOffice under the name Lotus Symphony. The package includes open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The suite has been available for some time (it’s the basis for Sun’s StarOffice, which also is included in the Google Pack of apps), but IBM’s embrace should give both the software and the Open Document Format some extra cachet among corporate customers.

* And as if that weren’t enough, Yahoo’s just-announced purchase of Zimbra, maker of open-source Web e-mail and calendaring software for corporate customers, seems to signal its intent to duel with both Microsoft and Google for some of the business market.