Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a guest appearance at the Web 2.0 conference. During his conversation, hosted by John Battelle, someone from the audience asked Brin about when a 'Google Office,' a web-based productivity suite, would appear. Brin responded: "I don't really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly, and say can we do the minicomuter on the Web on AJAX makes sense. I'm not saying that's what [Microsoft] Office is, I'm just saying that I think the Web and Web 2.0, if that's what you want to call it, gives you the opportunity to do new and better things than the Office package and more. We don't have any plans [to do an office suite]." He went on to say that there are good Web-based applications popping up and that Google would do its thing, and that working with documents will become a lot more convenient than it is today. That sounds like Google may build or buy at some point, given that one of Google's goals, according to Brin, is to impact things where people spend a lot of time. such as email.

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