Microsoft still has a few tricks up its sleeve in the battle of the online office apps. On Tuesday, the company demonstrated new, stripped-down online versions of its Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications that run in the browser.

These “Office Web Applications” will be released as part of Office 14, the next version of Microsoft’s desktop suite of productivity apps. Office 14 is expected in late 2009 or early 2010.

The public demo was given at the end of the morning keynote at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. During the demo, both IE and Firefox were used. The apps are built entirely in HTML and JavaScript, but add-ons will be made available to add Silverlight content. The apps are also designed to degrade gracefully for smartphones.

It’s important to note that unlike purely online offerings from Google and Zoho, these lightweight Office apps aren’t intended to serve as replacements for Microsoft Office. They offer live collaboration features and auto-synching of changes to the desktop or remote storage services. They also have user interfaces that very closely match those of their desktop counterparts. But they’re missing some of the more powerful features of the native apps.

We can be certain Microsoft will still ship a new version of Office for the PC desktop — the suite has proven to be its most valuable cash cow behind its Windows desktop and server products.

Another interesting point: Microsoft has already released a beta of Office Live Workspaces, a collaborative online environment for sharing office docs and doing some lightweight editing. How will that offering differ from these web apps coming in Office 14?

There’s no real strategy yet, and it’s very confusing. It seems as though Microsoft’s Live Services team and its Office team have been doing a little too much independent thinking. If they put their heads together around the online Office strategy, they could come up with a monster.

Most people who edit and share docs online (including us and most of the editorial team at Wired.com) love Google Docs and Zoho. Those free products give us everything we need in an online office app. But we’re early adopters. If Microsoft were to offer a paid version of Office — or even a free, ad-supported version — with a UI that mirrors what’s in the desktop version, it could finally bridge the gap for those who’ve been stubborn to move their workflows online.

In short, watch your back, Google. Microsoft is a believer in web apps, too. It’s just being more cautious and deliberate about them.

See Also

• Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode
• Google Docs Update Offers Students Another Reason to Skip Microsoft Word
• Tutorial: Create Automated Backups in Google Docs Using the GData API