If the rumors are to be believed, this coming Monday could see Microsoft taking the wraps off an online version of its Office software.

People have been wondering where the online version of Office has been for a while now, and if the rumors are to be believed, then we will see the official announcement of the product on Monday at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.

What does this mean to you as a consumer?  Well, we’ll know more on Monday, but it’s thought that you will be able to synchronize documents back and forth to the online version of the application and your desktop so that no matter which version you choose to use to do your work you will always have the latest version at the ready.

It is fairly obvious this is a direct strike out at Google Documents which has been gaining a small portion of the office application market, but not enough to truly make Microsoft worry.  The thing that Microsoft has to realize is that it isn’t so much the online nature of Google Docs that appeals to people as it is the fact it’s free.  No matter which version of Office you buy, it is an expensive proposition; even if you qualify for the student version, it isn’t cheap.

Seeing as the StarterTech offices currently has 4 laptops and 6 desktops to maintain, buying Office for each and every system was just no longer an option.  On our non-mission critical systems we opted to only use Google Docs to try to save ourselves dropping another load of cash on yet another copy of Office.  Sure Docs isn’t quite perfect, but it gets the job done.

So while it’s nice that Microsoft is finally acknowledging the growing trend of the online computing community, perhaps they should be thinking more about price than features.