In one of the unlikelier moves I’ve seen a large company make in a long, long time, but it looks like Redmond is firing a return volley at Google since the search engine giant announced the development of a full laptop operating system earlier this month. One of google’s mainstays beyond search and gmail was the Google Apps platform that is essentially an Office suite served over the ‘net. Millions of people use it, however Microsoft has a near-monopoly among professional and business users of the Microsoft Office suite of services.

Coming in 2010, Microsoft offers to release the Office 2010 suite free online to it’s (similarly free) Windows Live account holders. While details are sketchy and it’s not known spefically which features may be enabled or disabled, it’s likely that the Online 2010 suite will be delivered in either ad-supported and paid subscription tiers that eliminates the advertising and adds some services.

What makes this an interesting move is that while Google has always been proactive in engaging other companies on their home turf, Microsoft has heretofore not made moves that really focused on online “live” services in a serious way. Bundling other services to the MS Office online is also much easier and avoids (I expect, although I’m no lawyer) all of the legal hassle Microsoft has experienced before from US and foreign courts regarding such antitrust issues… as linking from one particular service to another when one can simply type in another company’s service in the URL bar seems to me like a decent defence.

If you’ll allow me the opportunity for a moment to go deep-geek in conjecture, I was wondering if Microsoft will want to rethink it’s position on HTML5 (HTML being the background of code support for information over the web). HTML version 5 supports native media (audio and video) file playback and manipulation, and I imagine that fully supporting HTML5 would make the whole process of developing an Office web service a heck of a lot easier for MS program for and faster for users on the front end. But in an article at Internetnews.com, an MS spokesperson said, “”We do not currently support the AUDIO or VIDEO tag [features of the news HTML5 specification /bryan] and are concerned about the patent issues that surround some of the codecs,” a Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com. “We’ll continue to be involved in the HTML working groups around this issue and work to find a viable solution.”

So it remains to be seen if this move to grab (or at least keep) “live” users from Google will result in changing standards on the web, but on the whole it’s a good move.