Is it time to give up on Microsoft Office?

I will be the first to admit that Microsoft's Office suite has a significant amount of power and functionality. I will also be the first to admin that I, like many folks, only use a small portion of this power and functionality.

Furthermore, when I think about how I use this functionality, most of my "power use" is with my corporate job vs. more home use and the use I see from my SMB business associates.

So this brings up the question does anyone outside of the corporate environment need to use the expensive and resource using Microsoft Office?

Before I answer that, let's talk about document collaboration. Corporations have needs to share documents, but my own personal experience is this is more talk then action, though I am trying to make this more of a reality in my corporate job. When there is true document collaboration, it is usually around something like Microsoft's SharePoint product. SharePoint is a very nice product, but the cost and complexity of this product limits SharePoint to the corporate world.

The home and SMB market actually uses more collaboration then the corporate world, in some ways. This means a document product that can provide integrated collaboration would make sense to the home and SMB market.

With this as background I think it makes sense for most home and SMB users to start with Google Apps as their document management tool of choice. Only if there is some functionality that Google Apps can't provide should you start looking at alternatives, but even if you do start looking, there are many alternatives beyond Microsoft Office such as Open Office (just to name one).

For companies worried about using the individual Google applications, you should look at the Corporate version of Google Apps which is a very reasonable $50 / user / year. This provides more controls and management around the various applications (Docs, mail, IM, calendar).

As I have mentioned before, I like the Google products, but they are not perfect, but as a default choice they make more sense then defaulting to Microsoft's Office suite.

I am not alone in suggesting SMBs look at Google Apps as there is a growing trend among companies and schools to go this direction. In terms of individuals, unless you already have an Office license, now is the time to go with Google Docs.

Let me know if you agree that we have reached the tipping point or if you are still in the Office corner of this battle.