Google's secret PowerPoint clone

The Google Operating System blog has reported on an interesting development over at Google. Someone decided to take the headers from a Google document and post them to Google Docs as a separate file. This values in those header appear to show that Google is planning to add a presentation application called "Presently" to their current suite of word processing and spreadsheet apps. The header cotain the following

var MSG_VIEW_PRESENTATION=”View presentation”;
var MSG_PRESENTATION_SETTINGS=”Presentation settings”;
var MSG_DOC_TO_PRESENTATION=”Convert document to presentation”;
var MSG_DOC_TO_PRESENTATION_HINT=”Once your document is converted to a presentation, you can insert\nslide breaks using Insert > Slide from the main menu.”;
var MSG_PRESENTATION_TO_DOC=”Convert presentation to document”;
var MSG_POPUP_BLOCKER=”Presently is unable to launch your presentation in full-screen mode.\nCheck your pop-up blocker settings.”;
var MSG_NEW_SLIDE_TITLE=”New Slide”;
var MSG_UNSUPPORTED_BROWSER=”Unsupported Browser\nPresently doesn\’t support Opera and will not function properly.\nWould you like to continue anyway?”;

Interestingly since the Google OS blog posted about this, the original doc has been edited so no references to Presently are there anymore. Google OS blog has provided a screenshot though.

I don't think this development should come as a surprise to anyone with a techie interest really. At the end of last year I posted about where I thought the web would go in 2007. The long and short of it was that web applications would continue to encroach on Microsoft's dominance of the Office space. Google creating a PowerPoint clone is part of that.