Google's secret weapon: Gmail links
Google's reading your email - and doing some really smart, helpful things in response to what it sees. Google's inserting more and more links to other products in Gmail emails. First there was Google Maps: Put anything that looks like an address in an email, and Google automatically added a link to that location. Then came the ability to detect that an email is an invitation to an event and have it added to your Google Calendar. In the latest move, Google is offering to open Microsoft Excel attachments in Google Spreadsheets, Google Blogoscoped reports.
There's nothing nefarious about this, of course. Google's not blocking you from adding events to Outlook or opening files in Excel. But it's becoming easier and easier to stay in Google's Web orbit, and harder and harder to break out and take the additional steps needed to use a Microsoft desktop-software product. Will this kind of quiet integration slowly bleed away Redmond's business? Call it death by a thousand hyperlinks. 
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