Microsoft's Office 2010 might hold a commanding share of the productivity-software market, far outpacing Google Docs, but something's making me think that the folks at Redmond might be more concerned about the potential of cloud-based productivity apps than they're publicly letting on.

To wit, one of Microsoft's blogs unleashed a bit of snark in Google's direction the other day. I neglected writing about it at first--another day, another corporation firing a broadside--but I think the missive brings up some interesting things about desktop versus cloud.

"When was the last time you called Google for help recovering a lost Google Doc? Were you even able to find a number? My guess is, no," Barbara Gordon, corporate vice president of Microsoft Customer Service and Support, wrote in a June 28 posting on the Official Microsoft Blog. "In my opinion and the opinion of others, Google simply does not provide that level of service."

Gordon then shifted her cannons to attack, implicitly, the cloud's nasty little habit of occasional downtime.

"For consumer and small business customers, we provide traditional support through phone and e-mail, as well as a variety of automated and online capabilities," she wrote. "After all, if you have a book report due at 8 a.m. the next day, you can't afford to wait for your online applications to be available."

Considering that even the youngest quartile of Official Microsoft Blog readers probably filed their last book reports when Clinton was still president, that's probably not the best lost-document example one could give. Nonetheless, we'll roll with it, because there's a larger point here: When was the last time your PC ate a document, and your first reaction was to pick up a phone and call Microsoft? Office automatically saves a backup of whatever you're working on, and makes it easily retrievable--more than a few helpful Websites will walk you through the process, if you don't know what to do.

No, what's being expressed here is Microsoft's fear about the prospect of Google eating into its productivity market share, something that Redmond is also trying to counter with Office Web Apps. That cloud-based offering lets users view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents online via Office.Live.com, although some advanced features have been reserved for the desktop-based Office 2010.

With regard to the productivity-software market, and desktop versus cloud, it's not an all-out competition yet ("Invariably, some reviews will compare Google Docs and Office Web Apps ... as if they were meant to be comparable offerings," JP Gownder, a Forrester analyst, wrote in a June 14 posting on his eponymous blog. "This is a mistake.") But with cloud computing becoming more prevalent, Microsoft clearly sees that its position could be threatened by Google and its ilk.

That's because, in the future, the cloud will become more reliable; more people will want applications that let them seamlessly transfer documents from a mobile device to a desktop PC to other screens; the growth in tablets and other alternative form factors will lead to demand for more stripped-down productivity software. Microsoft can meet that future, of course, by creating the right products. But calling out Google for lack of a customer service number isn't the way to do that--especially when you consider that Google Docs has its very own Help page.