Slashdot Mirror
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
Warhammer forums
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.
Deleted
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.
Deleted
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- 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.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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%.