Google is reportedly in talks with a South Korean software company and its U.S. subsidiary ThinkFree, a maker of browser-based office productivity software compatible with Microsoft Corp. file formats. ThinkFree of San Jose, California, is a subsidiary of Haansoft, which is based in Seoul. Haansoft’s Chief Executive Officer, Baek Jong-jin, said he met twice this month with Google’s corporate development team responsible for the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, the English-language newspaper Korea Times reported on Sunday. Google is mounting a challenge to Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop office productivity software market, by introducing hosted applications that have the feel of a desktop program. Google’s offerings, such as Docs and Spreadsheets, let users access and edit files through a Web browser from any computer, with the files hosted on Google’s servers.

ThinkFree’s applications run in a similar way. The company’s free offering, ThinkFree Office Online, is a suite of Java applets, downloaded from the company’s servers and cached on the user’s computer. Users have 1GB of storage and can use ThinkFree’s Calc, a spreadsheet; Show, a presentation program; and Write, a word processor. Thinkfree Office is compatible with Microsoft’s Excel, PowerPoint, and Word file formats. ThinkFree offers a Server Edition for $30 a year, which the company advertises is a “fraction” of the cost for licenses for Microsoft’s Office suite. ThinkFree has a desktop edition and two portable editions, one of which allows the viewing of PowerPoint slides on iPod multimedia players.