Google has unveiled its long-awaited calendar. Check it out here.

This Google Calendar, aka gCal, has been a long time coming.

To be fair, since Google never acknowledged it was working on this thing, it's unfair to say it's late. There's a benefit to being completely opaque to users and the rest of the world: You really can't be held accountable for timing. If no timeframe is announced, there are no slips. Diabolically clever.

The feeling is that the Web-based calendar service, plus the Writely, Web-based word processor, plus whatever else Google has up its sleeves, will constitute a real threat to Microsoft Office/Microsoft Word dominance. In fact, it seems anything Google does, or may dream of doing, has a lot of Redmond knickers in a twist.

Some at Microsoft say the Google fixation there has distracted the company from more important things, like say getting its core products--Vista for example--out something close to on time.

Perhaps this camp is getting traction because Microsof'ts public statements lately seem to show renewed focus on big bad IBM as the rival-du-jour.

After Microsoft talked up some of its spyware/adware plans a few months back, one insider had this to say:

"Woohoo, we're in the spyware/adware business now. Yay! Google's doing it, it's trendy! We must blindly follow Google over the cliff like lemmings! Maybe we can be like Verisign and buy companies like weblogs.com (check it out, it's a PORTAL FOR SPAM--yeah, that's worth two million)!

"I really think that with all the random businesses they're entering, it's perhaps a carefully calculated strategy to see how much money and energy any potential competitor to their search business will spend on wild goose chase products in order to head off Google 'competition' that is little more than hot air."

So there.

That scenario is not unlike the U.S. spending the old U.S.S.R "evil empire" out of super-powerdom back in th day.

Oh, back to Google calendar: If you want to try it and you're a gmail user, you can sign up from your gmail account. Of course the calendar is in beta. Come to think of it, so is gmail.

Which leads to another question: Is anything at Google other than the search itself OUT of beta? Wait, a colleague ventures that Google News is, in fact, out of the test realm.

Phew.