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Google Releasing an Office Suite
prostoalex writes "Google Apps for Your Domain is Google's entrance into the office productivity world, but contrary to popular expectations, the company is not shipping word processor or spreadsheet for corporate use just yet. Google, Inc. bundled e-mail client (Gmail), shared calendaring environment (Google Calendar), instant messaging client (GTalk) and HTML page generator (Google Page Creator) to be used across specific domains. The service will be ad-supported, reports the Associated Press." From that article: "The free edition of Apps for Your Domain is, like Google's main site, supported with ads. By the end of the year, the company also plans to launch a paid version that will offer more storage, some degree of support, and likely, no ads. A price for this edition hasn't been set. Providing e-mail and other applications for businesses moves Google closer into what has traditionally been turf occupied by Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, Google released a program that builds simple Excel-type spreadsheets but lets users access them on the Web."
I would have been very surprised if they had released Google Spreadsheet for business use as it just isn't anywhere near Excell's functionality yet. If they want to compete with such a heavily entrenched program, then they're going to need to make it at least as useable before it will be accepted (which Google seems to realise).
Also it's pretty slow, so that's a big downside as well.
the emphasis is on SIMPLE. Forget anything the least bit beyond straight text/numbers. Even relatively simple formatting (SKU's looking like they're printed with - appropriately placed) isn't going to happen. The Google version as it works now has a limit on 50,000 cells, which, seems like a lot, but probably isn't so much. There's a nice sharing thing built in which would make it pretty dang handy for a not too fancy fantasy football league. I guess it fits in that niche between tables on a website and Open Office, with a bias towards collaboration but that's about it.
How much demand will there really be from corporate users? I would assume that most would be nervous about this sort of application environment due to the failure of ASPs (application service providers) to take off a few years ago, and see a lot of similarities between ASPs and what google and others are offering, the only main difference being that it is google and not some startup. Are the companies that would be interested in this already nervous from being burned by ASPs. Obviously there are many ASPs that are successful, but they tend to be more specialised than the generic offerings from google and yahoo et al. fwiw; here are some of the risks from wikipedia's ASP page:
* Loss of control of corporate data
* Loss of control of corporate image
* Insufficient ASP security to counter risks
* Exposure of corporate data to other ASP customers
* Compromise of corporate data
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This has nothing to do with the Office Suite! .mac and live.com and then let companies use this and kill exchange. THEN they will move on to the office suite.
They want to compete with
is that even through all the advancements we've been able to make over the years, online applications are still slower than those that you install on your desktop. it _might_ be more secure since google _should_ have backups. hacking would be another story though. but i would definitely see this as a low risk set of tools given that it's free, the docs are portable and you just need a browser to start working. will it be enough to dethrone ms office? i don't see it that way though. but it should be enough to make bill and steve worry a bit. *insert chair joke*
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
One or two person companies. For them this is perfect. Microsoft have long since forgotten about this crowd as they focused more and more on the corporate customer.
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Getting, installing, fixing, securing, upgrading. Not interested.
It's like me and my car, couldn't care less as long as it gets me from A to B. If public transport could get me pretty much from A to B as well as the car I'd happily ditch it. Same's true of computers, if they can get rid of all the IT bollocks, they will, happily.
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I don't think corporate users are the main target at the moment for Google (nor will they ever be I think). I think it is the home users who do not want to fork up for $$$ or for an office suite. Google has always targeted the small users which there are more of than corporate users and which in the long run will bring in more money than then corporate users.
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- No word processor. Check.
- No spreadsheet. Check.
- No presentation tool. Check.
Seriously - how is this "Google Releasing an office suite"?ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I'd like my documents securely on my hard drive and completely under my control. I see no reason to let Google store them for me.
Since its all client-side javascript, I can see them addressing both bloat and functionality by having users custom configure what functions they need the spreadhseet to have, and having only those javascript libraries loaded by default.
This would also open it up to 3rd-party developers, who could submit their scripts as add-ins.
Want your spreadsheet to automatically text message you when a certain field hits a critical value? Want your spreadsheet to email a diff when Joe Luser saves it? Wnat yur spreadsheet to look up stuff in an external database based on a crc64 of the values in other fields? No problemo.
Office Suite or not, Google Calendar beats MS Outlook's Calendar by a huge margin. And GMail searches are very fast, while Outlook email searches are very slow.
Google has a good start on a superior replacement for Outlook.
For the rest of the office suite, there's OpenOffice.
I think the market for Google Spreadsheet isn't in a direct replacement of an offline, desktop spreadsheeting program, but as part of a more collaborative workflow.
Honestly I don't think Google is aiming to replace Excel, per se. MS has too long a head start, and frankly they'd just be putting themselves in the position of playing catch-up, forever. (Kinda like WINE; people that want to find some reason not to like it, are always going to find one.)
Rather than just looking at G-Spreadsheet as "Excel...but free!" it seems better to look at what it can offer that Excel can't. Particularly since being 'free' isn't that compelling a feature, given that most companies see Microsoft Office as a sunk cost -- just part of the overhead of owning a computer. The killer feature of Google Spreadsheet is sharing.
A little ways up in the thread somebody was discussing a problem (that is very common) where you might send a bunch of people a very simple spreadsheet, in his example it was a class grading sheet. Each of them work on it and send it back to you. When you get it back, you have a mess -- how do you combine the changes back into one document? There's really not any good way to do it. The best thing you can do is to have a rigid document-management workflow, where only one person at a time can have the "working copy" of a document, and then they pass it around. (Storing it on a fileserver basically does this, but necessitates a fileserver and also brings in additional problems.)
There's definitely a market for something that allows for a lot more collaboration than the MS Office suite either allows or is designed for. Google, if they're smart (and I have every reason to think that they are) is probably looking to do more than just "reinvent the wheel...online." Or at least, if they're going to reinvent the wheel, they know that their wheel has to have some compelling features that will make people switch. In this case, I don't think that the feature is going to be the fact that it's free, it's going to be the ability to share and collaborate without worrying about CMSes, file sharing, Citrix, or any of the other hacks which people basically use in order to make single-user desktop apps more collaborative.
In the same way that someone once joked that IRC is "multiplayer Notepad," G-Cal might begin as "multiplayer Excel," but end up looking like something totally different from what it would be like, without the interactive/collaborative ability.
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If Google decides to open up and the spreadsheet application, so that it can be installed on corporate networks, I can see it taking quite a bit of market share from MS. It would allow for full colaboration, instantly - instead of E-mailing the same file around a hundred times.
Of course, it would need a *few* more features.
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
At the end of the FAQ page there's a section with information for people using Google Apps for Education. High schools (and perhaps even colleges) would benefit from being able to offload these sorts of IT needs onto Google, therefore allowing their meager IT staffing to focus on education-specific IT infrastructure requirements.
Also, the SOHO and non-profit fields would really benefit as well. The more of these basic things we offload, the more we can focus our energies on our actual fields. If we were starting our non-profit from scratch, I would definitely be encouraging us to use this. Even still, once they release the ad-free version, I'm going to be comparing it to what we're currently paying for our webhosting. If it's the same or cheaper, then I'm going to be proposing a switch. Gmail is much better than our current email offering, and a shared calendar service would make many lives easier.
Does it work on the airplane? The train? The bus?
These new Internet applications are great as a demo of what can be done, but they're not really useful in the larger scheme of things, ESPECIALLY in corporate or business environments.
In many of the corporations I've been in, getting outbound port 80 access from various departments is restricted (for good reason), as are IM ports and other things. You don't want to be putting company financials out on some website's spreadsheet, do you?
What routers are you going through?
Who else can see that information?
Is there a caching proxy upstream that you don't know about?
What happens when the network goes down?
Too risky, and it only works where there's an Internet connection, which (contrary to public belief) is not ubiquitous these days.
for Google, the next step would be to create a javascript/css/html based presentation application to rival powerpoint.
Powerpoint is the weak link in the chain of MS Office hegemony. It does the least of the MS Office suite to justify its proprietary format. Building a web standards (or defacto subset of standards) based application means immediately every desktop computer has a compatible player.
Next GWT provides a toolkit for creating "active content" that runs in our presentations, a nice "aftermarket" for small software developers. Add a halfway composer/ide with webdav support and it could become, for many, a replacement for FrontPage as well.
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Google Apps include:
o r-your-domain/)
- Gmail
- Google Calendar
- Google Chat
- Google Web Page Creator
It sounds to me more like a competitive shared hosting solution for small business, rather than an office suite.
(More info: http://www.h3rald.com/articles/view/google-apps-f
Of course the average user only uses 10% of {Excel|Word|VisualStudio|Etc}'s features. The problem, as developers should very well know, is that everyone uses a different 10%.
I knew I'd get that.
It's a rule of thumb that 80% of the users only uses 20% of the functions. I think that for Excel it's much more extreme, because so many people uses it, and there really isn't very many powerusers out there.
I wasn't talking about the place I work, I really don't think that company matters much to the world market of spreadsheets.
If course there are large groups of powerusers here and there, but I doubt that it's even 10% of the users. And I'd say you're a poweruser if you use just 10% of Excel.
It's kind of like a car. There's a lot of users, but not very many know more than what you need to know to drive them. And even that is often lacking. (Peoplo not checking for oil, not checking the lights, have fog lights on when there's not fog...)
I guess most people use far less than 10% of the thingies you could do something with in your car. Ask around, how many people has operated their fuelpump manually? Read errorcodes from the enginecomputer? Upgraded firmware in it?
No kidding... is MS going to figure out how to, I dunno, INDEX the mail properly for fast searching?
When I can search thousands of GMail messages instantly, and then it takes Outlook a minute or two to search fucking TEXT on my LOCAL HARD DISK, you know there's a problem.
based on the text being ad support, it will be very unwise for business to use it even if it is free.
assuming they put up the increased functionality of a word processor and spreadsheet (even presentation,) then they will practically be able to read the documents of everyone. it's like giving your ideas, corporate secrets, intentions, plans, etc to google for them to see. even if they are for "ad purposes", it is still scary. basically, they already know me inside out from the searches i make (even though i disable cookies by default, my isp gives me an almost static ip add.)
no thanks. i'll keep private data with me. i've got open office just in case the free argument goes into place. i'm beginning to appreciate microsoft now as google is able to collect much more information from me than them.
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After all of this talk of an office suite, columns and opinions about whether or not Google is going to ship an office suite, they are calling this an office suite?
Someone tell me how a web email client, a calendar, an instant messager and a HTML application is a full office suite? Then allow me to beat you over the head with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Powerpoint. OpenOffice is an Office suite, this is media hype. But we can't plug OpenOffice in the general media though, because general knowledge that home users are paying hundreds of dollars for something they could just as easily get for free might slow down commerce.
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