Google plugs along in apps market

Many say Google Docs and Apps have benefited from Microsoft's slowness in Web-enabling Office. Recently, Microsoft has been taking concrete steps in this direction. Does this concern you?

No, right now we're only concerned with things that are out there today. I can't spend the time to say "what if." It's a different product set still [between Docs and Office]. Even if there are some overlaps in functions, we see ours as a sharing and collaborative app.

Yes, people are saying Microsoft has been slow to respond but all that does is give credibility to the approach we're taking. What people are saying [about Docs] is that it's a great product and that a company like Microsoft should probably do something like it. To me, that's a fantastic statement -- that what we're doing is credible.

I don't worry about what Microsoft might do. I look at their [Office] announcements and say "Is there something there I should understand? Has it become a competitor or not?" But otherwise it's not something we focus on.

Docs users often complain that Google doesn't offer enough technical support, that when they have a problem or a question, their only recourse is to post a message on the Docs discussion forum and hope for an answer. How are you dealing with this?

Yeah, that's a huge challenge. What we're doing to address that doesn't change the fact that we're always going to have this huge imbalance between numbers of users and support [staffers]. But we try to constantly improve the content of our Help [pages] and the user-to-user interaction.

A lot of what we see happening is that we set up these user-to-user groups which almost serve each other. We're involved in them as well, but it helps our scale. And regarding our Help content, we're constantly reviewing [those stats] to see where people are failing in searching and trying to find answers. Within those, we try to address the content to make it something you can find more easily, to make it more targeted to what they're looking for. We're also starting to provide more context-sensitive help: things that are within the app that help you either find the feature or understand how to use it.