Last night I thought it odd that Writely was prominently displaying a planned outage notice. This morning, I found that www.writely.com redirects to Google's new Docs and Spreadsheets page. What gives?

Basically, just a sensible, if modest, integration of two online office services - Writely's word processing and Google's homegrown spreadsheet app - just in time for the Office 2.0 conference. (Where are the branding people at Google, though? Docs and Spreadsheets? And when Google adds the next piece of Office, what will they call it? Docs, spreadsheets and slideshows? Please.)

Michael Arrington notes:

Google is straightforward in its goal to excel in collaboration and sharing of documents, while agreeing that desktop office applications will continue to offer superior editing features for the foreseeable future. Still, the ability to import and collaborate on a document, and then publish it to the web or take it back to the desktop, is a powerful feature not available to Microsoft Office users outside of Office Live or Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server. And use of Google’s online office applications is free.