The search giant is consolidating many of its online applications, from word processor to spreadsheet to e-mail. These tools have been available for free, but a new option puts them together at $50 per account a year, including telephone support and additional storage. That sounds like a competitor to Microsoft Office.

Or maybe not. I can't believe that Google expects to take on Microsoft at the enterprise level, where huge organizations make life or death decisions about software. Google Apps Premier Edition is one-tenth the cost of Office Professional 2007, but will financial institutions be willing to entrust sensitive information to Google's servers?

What I will believe is that Google is smart enough to explore how to broaden access to its tools to small businesses that find setting up and maintaining networks is a burden.

It is said that half the employees in the United States don't have e-mail at work; $50 a year might be the right price to change that. This despite the drawbacks: The Google suite won't work when you're not connected to the Internet; and network applications hardly offer the responsiveness of programs running on your local machine.

Some of these drawbacks may be why the market for online software hasn't taken off for Google.

Consider the Google Docs & Spreadsheets product, which owns the greatest market share for online productivity programs. Nielsen/NetRatings sees flat growth in the last three months of 2006 for the service, with less than 500,000 unique visitors. Google says that e-mail and messaging package Apps for Your Domain, a component of the new premier offering, is in use at about 100,000 small businesses. Online office tools clearly need serious marketing to overcome perceived obstacles.

But you and I benefit from these market forays, because Google is going to keep tweaking the online software model, while continuing to roll out new services. The company recently acquired Jotspot, which means that Google will be offering options for collaborative Web pages called wikis, another way for users to organize data collaboratively. While Google execs tune their products, individual users can tap much of this innovation for free to see how online software can fit their daily needs.

I'm keeping a number of Google products open all the time these days. Here are two:

* Google Notebook (google.com/notebook). It lets you grab text from a Web page or type in random notes. You can accumulate information from several sources then use the built-in search tool -- this is Google, remember -- to track down any text.

Add the browser extension -- available when you sign up for the service -- and you can select text from within the Web page you are looking at. Or simply use Notebook for random thoughts, ideas or appointments. The beauty of a full-text search is that you won't lose anything, and you can throw away the pencil and notepad near your keyboard.

* Gmail (gmail.google.com). Available without restriction, you can create a free e-mail address, then set the program to forward any mail you receive there to your permanent address. When spammers target that address, just delete it and create a new one.

What I'm driving at is that there is no either/or model. Figure out where you can include online tools in what you do, and you can get the best of both worlds.

My guess is that Microsoft isn't going to lose many of its existing 450 million Office users to Google, but a lot of them are going to be tapping online programs selectively as adjuncts to their daily work.

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