WITHIN Microsoft’s Office group, the calendar on the wall appears to be 1983, the year the company introduced Microsoft Word. The company still expects customers to buy its software applications as products and install and run them on PCs.

Recognition of the Internet has been slow in coming. Microsoft is finally preparing Web versions of its Office suite, though these are intended as supplements, not as replacements. The company maintains that Web versions of a Word or Excel will never match the functionality and responsiveness that software installed on one’s own machine provides.

It may be wrong.

Granted, Microsoft’s largest competitor, Google, has not yet marched up to the bulwarks guarding Microsoft Office and blown a gaping hole into its adversary’s complacency. Google Apps, its Office-like suite, contains an uneven bunch of services. I find Google Calendar far superior to Microsoft Outlook’s calendar, but Google’s word processor, Docs, lacks many features in Word that I rely on.

The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.