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Hands on: Google Spreadsheets
feminazi writes "Google spreadsheets are more powerful than you might think, according to Richard Ericson. The free, Web-based service doesn't currently offer encryption, but the clean interface has standard drop-down menus, icons and buttons (just when MS is switching to "ribbons"). You can use it to work with existing files and "Formatting is simple, direct and fast. ... Sort, does precisely what you'd expect." Most importantly, it has most of Excel's functions -- including some that aren't listed or documented." We covered the launch of this program last week.
The key to this being an "Excel Killer" is not that it needs to be able to do everything (or even most) of what Excel can do. Most people barely use probably 2% of Excel's capabilities, and don't even know how to use much of the other 98%.
The key to putting some hurt onto Excel sales, and MS Office in general is for Google to offer things like this that are "good enough" for the mass of home users that use 2% of Excel's product offerings. I personally have started using this for a couple personal spreadsheets that I have, where the network availability is more useful than having the whiz-bang Excel features.
Let's not forget that Google has also purchased Writely, which may be a "good enough" web based word processor to start attracting the mass of people who use Word as a fancy notepad.exe with spell-check. I don't need a heavy duty Word processor for most of what I do, and many other home users don't either. Writely is not yet available for users to register, unless they got in pre-Google.
While the Writely and Google Spreadsheets combo are not "killer apps" in terms of features, they may have enough functionality to put a serious dent in the very low end of Microsoft's user base.
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What about when Sears created the Discover card (which is now its own company and Sears' future looks gloomy) or when the Wright brothers built a flying machine in their bicycle shop. It's a fundamental of business -- change is fact: you can either be part of it or watch it happen. Google is simply applying their resources to expand the productivity they offer the average user. I like it.
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Although not their original business model, selling contextual ads has by far been their most succesful. In that sense, this new app supports that objective nicely.
Only problem with "Most people barely use 2% of Excel's capabilities, let's implement just that 2%" theory is - not all people use the same 2% of Excel, or any other software packet.
Google's doing this in a rather smart way, IMHO...
They're not chasing Excel's market. Nobody's going to be using this for business-critical applications, and this won't challenge the corporate market for Office. What Google is doing is chasing the long tail of the market - the people who might want to use a spreadsheet, but have no need for Excel. Let's face it, for a quick and dirty budget, a team roster, or a simple document, Excel is more than overkill.
What Google Spreadsheets has that Excel doesn't is simple collaboration -- no need to install SharePoint servers or any of that other Microsoft lock-in garbage required. Just add a few emails to a field and you're done. That is ideal for a whole host of simple, small projects. Say you're running a small business and want to have online schedules -- would you use Excel and some expensive Microsoft server setup, or just make a simple spreadsheet with Google and share it amongst your employees? It seems pretty easy to guess which one is the easiest and least painful option to someone without an IT budget.
Google knows that if they try to compete with Office, they'll get crushed. So they're not doing that at all. Google Spreadsheets isn't an enterprise app, it's a quick and dirty system for simple tasks -- and it excels at being what it is. By capturing that long tail of users who don't need Excels features and won't pay Excel's price, Google can pick up a sizeable user base. The real question is what Google intends to do with those users and how they'll turn this into a revenue generator.
I imagine if they wanted to put the hurt on MS's Excel sales, they'd target the business user, not the home user.
I really don't think Google is out on a crusade to hurt MS. It probably doesn't care about MS one way or the other. It cares about driving more people to its search engine/advertising and creating a buzz, and if some web app does that for them, great. And if it hurts MS too, that might be a good thing (in their POV). Or maybe not.
The only way I can see MS hurting google is if they make IE point to MSN like Firefox does with Google on the top right search box. (Perhaps they've already done this, haven't used IE in a long time.) Other than that, they are in seperate markets, no matter how much MS wants to try to have a finger in every pie.
According to these, this useful application is potentially something that evolved based on smaller projects and a common code-base.
Admittedly, I've never used a spreadsheet for more than its basic functions (organizing data in columns for personal finances or some of the homebrew programming projects I work on), but if X% of Excel users are only utilizing Y% of the program's capabilities (where Y is a significantly small percentage of the program's full feature-set), any company can come along, produce a simple app which elegantly handles the most-sought-for features, and voila, competitor. From what I've seen of the managerial staff at work, the only thing Google Spreadsheets is missing to be a 'real' (read: truly useful for aforementioned X% of users) spreadsheet app, is a chart wizard.
It's a fundamental of business -- change is fact: you can either be part of it or watch it happen.
Not necessarily; for 37 years, the WD40 company produced exactly one product (I'll leave figuring out what they make as an exercise to the reader).
There's a difference between change necessary to adapt to a changing marketplace, and change simply for the sake of change.
No because Google has money has the money to waste. Not all the employees can be focused on search and advertising. Belive me, they have enough resources on search and advertising to not be dropping the golden ball. ... unless you have Google stock.
Anyways, if they do drop the ball, somebody else will be happy to replace them. No worries there either
Google provides a services which is somewhat hard to do well (search). It makes money by selling ads (mainly) and services around what it does well (search). The more content there is, the harder it will be for google to have competition that will be able to sprout up, due to data glut.
Remove the expensive cost of content tools, and more people can create more content, which they will WANT to search through. At the same time, remove your supposed competitors major source of revenue by fulfilling a need it would not, software that works, is light weight, and is free/cheap (good enough). This isn't just a smart move, it's about a shift in technology to provide people what they want and moving them toward benefiting your business model (designed to make money around what people want).
Want to see another point you may have missed? (major speculation) Telco's limit content in a tiered system, google buys a little more dark fiber and lights it up. Starts a local isp business through techies who don't want a tiered net, and act as partners in a 'mashup' of reselling google network access. Us local techies not liking telco or nsa habits of late, serve as local wifi resellers via mesh networks to solve the 'last mile' problem. All the time, solving our consumer problems and generating ad revenue for google.
Google has smart people doing smart things solving real problems with simple and very obvious solutions. No, I don't work for google, but if their looking... grin.
Anybody nervous that Google may be letting their eye off the ball (their original business model) by going off on these tangential projects?
No, most people are psyched about it. Long term R&D is something that is hardly encouraged anymore due to quarterly earnings pressure (*cough* HP *cough). Google, on the other hand, actually schedules programmers to work on side projects of their own design. They hire very smart people to think up the Next Big Thing so that they can exploit it. Contrast this with Microsoft expansion policy: throw massive amounts of cash at heavily entrenched markets, then fail to generate any profit. I much prefer Google's method to Microsoft's "send more men over the top" WW1-style attrition.
I'll stick with keeping spreadsheets on my own hard drive and servers, created with OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Excel.
Thanks, but no thanks Google. I do use gmail for personal stuff but I do not and will not use hosted office suites. I have no desire for you to know how much I weigh, what my client lists are, how much I spend, my DVD and CD collections, or anything else I might use a spreadsheet for.
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I think the bigger story here is that Google appears to be building an entire web-based office suite to go toe to toe with Microsoft (and OO.o?). They already have a mail client, word processor (Writely), and spreadsheet. What's next?
The key to this being an "Excel Killer" is not that it needs to be able to do everything (or even most) of what Excel can do. Most people barely use probably 2% of Excel's capabilities, and don't even know how to use much of the other 98%.
Who's saying it's an "Excel Killer"? My take is that it's yet another beta that Google tossed out. As others have pointed out, if Google were actually planning such a thing, they'd target the business users (which is where the money is). That means in particular, that web-based spreadsheets are out since the user doesn't have full control over the data. This is a fundamental problem with a lot of Google's tools. Google simply has far too much control over that data for serious companies to use it.Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
They might be using a pre-existing library/module that supports XLS, but not ODF currently. XLS support has been around for a long time and is stable while ODF is relatively new. (And possibly unstable.)
Yeah. This meme is kinda the opposite of the long-tail meme that's being making it's rounds.
On the one hand you have people telling you that you don't need to engage in software bloat, you don't need to add every single feature, you don't need to give the consumer every signle option or customizability in a product or offering.
On the other hand, you have countless numbers of folks touting the long-tail, whether it's the success of Amazon, or eBay, or Netflix, or what-have-you. The idea is that in offering every single last possible thing any consumer could conceive of wanting, you'll then doi more business with the obscure stuff than with the 20% most common/popular stuff.
So which is it? Do we keep things simple stupid? Do we offer limited functionality? Things that only do one thing and do it really well? Or do we offer swiss army knives of features/products? Do we appeal to every possible need and win out in the long run because no one just uses that initial 20%?
Let's settle this meme war once and for all.
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Because that same company, in its IPO filing, cited its key strength as an unflinching devotion to search. Everyone praised them as a company that WOULDN'T turn into yet another portal like Yahoo! and AltaVista had before. Since then they've thrown dozens of betas at the wall; some have stuck, some haven't, but very few are directly related to search.
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Please read the help that is neatly bundled with the app. It describes the limitations in size and cell/row count nicely.
Yes, this was a nice way of saying RTFM
They might be using a pre-existing library/module that supports XLS, but not ODF currently. XLS support has been around for a long time and is stable while ODF is relatively new. (And possibly unstable.)
;).
First off, ODF is not really all that new. It's just repackaged, genericized version of the original XML StarOffice/OpenOffice format and that's been around at least as long as Office XP (2002).
Secondly, from what I can gather in looking at the functions list in Google Spreadsheets, it seems to be very close to the OpenOffice Calc functions list. In fact, much closer to the OpenOffice Calc functions list than the Excel functions list, including some functions that exist in OpenOffice Calc that do not exist in Excel 2003.
So, unless I'm completely off, I'd guess that Google, who recently partnered with Sun to modify OpenOffice.org to work as a Web app, is actually using the OOo Calc code as its base.
In other words, adding ODF support should have been drop-dead easy.
I can only guess that the exclusion was a deliberate technical or political decision on Google's part, but not necessarily as a favor for Microsoft (it's not like Google and Microsoft are all buddy buddy, you know...
I guess only Google knows for sure...
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I travel a lot. Not only do I commute from home, school, and work, but I also take trips both personal and business-related. Meebo has already obviated the need for me to install Gaim or any other IM software on any of my systems. The computer terminals at work are highly regulated so I cannot install software or use USB keys. But because of Meebo, I have that functionality and I don't miss Gaim, AIM Triton, Yahoo Messenger, or MSN Messenger. Gmail has already taken over my e-mail and backup functions. (I use Thunderbird at home to pull mails off for archiving; I prefer the Gmail interface.) I already have been using Gmail to compose documents that I then save as a draft. The future may include Writely and Google Spreadsheets. I do not need a feature-rich client, but rather an available, dependable program that will allow me to transplant myself across different terminals without losing data or having to spend any time setting myself up.
Are we going back to the thin-client? Perhaps. Being able to work anywhere there is an Internet-connected computer regardless of the native software suite installed (other than a compatible Internet browser) is a very powerful ability indeed for someone who travels a lot.
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Supposedly for easy access to it anywhere with an internet connection. If they were targeting business users (largest market here) I would think that's why domains and group drives were created... for easy sharing
Having just gone through a company forced seminar on data security and what not to allow outside the wall of the building, the missing link in the release of this tool is security. Many of the users of Excel are corporate employees or business owners. As one of the corporate un-washed mass I tried out googlesheets using made up data, then an existing spreadsheet. Only after I opened the file did I remember to ask the question, where is this data going? When tried a save I noticed that it was not saving to my local disc as default, but to a remote server.
In my test case I did not use a file that had sensitive data, but I did start to ponder the question of how secure is the data I save. if governments can troll for data then what protects any data I store outside my business laptop or desktop? While the spreadsheet is an amazing tool for personal use, it would take but one leak, one crack which leaks even seemingly innocent company data to kill this as a viable web tool. Were Google to offer strong encryption as default then I would feel better about using this web tool (or any other) to share and access data on field trips, or when working with teams across the country. Till then, as per our company policy I will continue to utilize client based office tools, email sensitive files with encryption, or use sneaker mail.
As to Google's effort I say kudos. Of course it does not have all functionality out of the box, but it is better then the other web based, server-side excel like application out there.....Oh that's right, there was none. A great tool that will only get better, and when they can secure the data to the level that companies will trust, they *will* get the strong attention of Microsoft who has fattened on the Corporate largesse resulting from over-charging MS Office. In fact, if Google would sell or charge a corporation to run googlesheets from inside a corporate WAN/LAN at a competitive price, if Google provided 90% of the functionality that current excel users in corporate world use, if upgrades occurred in one spot not across countless workstations, and they did this at a cost the was drastically less then a Corporate License from MS for office....game over.
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There are some fairly basic things Google Spreadsheets can't do. For example, you cannot add decorative formatting to cells, which means that creating a "schedule" kind of document in Google Spreadsheets is impossible. It also tends to mangle Excel spreadsheets you send up to it.
I would never put real financial information on it. But for simple figuring, keeping track of the expenses you might incur on a trip, etc. etc. it's pretty neat. I won't abandon OpenOffice.Org anytime soon, but it's nice to have this kind of mathematical "scratch pad" available at any computer with FireFox or SeaMonkey.
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yeah their core competency is searching. but they just show to the world that with the pool of talent, resources(money and people) they have they can release products such as gmail, google talk, google maps, picassa. since it is not their core competency i don't know whether they want to make money out of it
If that were true, then why hasn't OpenOffice.org been an excel killer? It's well past the 2% mark.
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Hmm, shared spreadsheets in a small business... ever heard of a file server? Need something a little more dynamic and multiuser? Try a simple Access database.
Sorry, I see an extremely limited market for a crippled online spreadsheet app. Minimal spreadsheet programs have been around forever. It is nothing new. If people really couldn't afford office, they could download one of those minimal ones. But the fact is that most businesses already have Office installed. Why wouldn't they just fire that up and do a spreadsheet? In my experience, users don't really care if a program is bloated. They just use whatever they've been trained to use.
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