Ringier (the biggest media house in Switzerland) decides to replace all their propriety email system with google globally: for email, chat & calendaring mainly.
Interesting case study for many of the main advantages of Cloud & SaaS, like the high uptime & service level, low cost and maintenance, high update pace etc -

And it also showed, where (currently) the limits are of the browser: Ringier also decided to keep MS Office & upgrade to 2010, and NOT to replace it with google docs anytime soon (this article may be a little misleading in this) - the reason is simple:
The license costs for MSOffice per employee is here in Switzerland approximately equivalent to 1 minute (!) of work time. And the productivity gain through a locally installed app like MSOffice is bigger than this one minute per day.

And where was the biggest resistance for the migration? - no, not the users (in one of the recent countries, 91% of the users are happy about it) - The biggest resistance came from IT -

"And the productivity gain through a locally installed app like MSOffice is bigger than this one minute per day. " I think this is just some nice number-game to show, that Office is not that expensive.
The main reason for keeping Word is that you have more possibilities to format your document. The big advantages of Google Docs are, that you can collaborate on a document, you have a versioning-system and you don't have to search for it on the file-server.

Many times in the last years I heard the opinion, that Google docs will 'very soon' replace MSOffice - but it didnt happen upto now -
In this Ringier case, I found interesting to see,
> WHY cloud software WILL NOT replace desktop software (MSOffice wins vs Google Docs), as well as
> WHY cloud software eventually WILL replace desktop software (Gmail wins vs Native mail software)

If cloud software competes with desktop software by COPYING the features, it will not win, until the overall costs are lower -
In Ringier, Google docs has to be so good compared to MSOffice, that it causes less than 1 minute per day productivity loss compared to using MSOffice - As a desktop software is generally faster than one running in a browser, and as copying a product, which is in the market since decades is not easy, Google docs can not win in this competition -

With mail, we see however, HOW cloud software eventually WILL win against desktop: by adding cloud specific value, like:
> Accessible anywhere (Journalists at home, in hotels, Internet cafes, airports ...)
> Reliability & availability - if a local mail system was down, it took hours or even days to fix the problem - gmail however is very rarelly down - and if, then only for a few minutes.
> And (of course my favourite) Collaboaration - online status & availability, real time chat etc