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Google To Add Presentations
A number of readers (some from the audience at Web 2.0 Expo) wrote to let us know that Google is adding presentations to their Docs and Spreadsheets package. With the announcement the company revealed that they have purchased Tonic Systems to help with the new presentation software. It's expected to be ready by summer. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was asked if Docs and Spreadsheets will compete with MS Office, and he said, "We don't think so. It doesn't have all the functionality, nor is it intended to have the functionality of products like Microsoft Office."
99% of the time most people use the "standard" features of MSOffice. GOffice will be fine with this. Unfortunately, for the 1%, everyone uses a different piece of advanced functionality and get annoyed that THEIR pet feature is missing. Good to have an alternative with intarwebbiness built in though I guess.
Remove the chairs from the building!
Will google's product cause brain damage?
They wanted to offer a new product, and bought a company to do so? Isn't that sort of a Microsoft thing?
With the announcement the company revealed that they have purchased Tonic Systems to help with the new presentation software.
What exactly do Google employees do all day? Count money, play pool, and ride Segways?
Furthermore, if this cannot export to PDF or PowerPoint, it's pretty much useless. When giving presentations, Internet access is rarely provided or is flakey at best.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Googles gettin a lil big for their britches. I think its time to turn a good hard cynical eye towards everything they do.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Export to ODF. I suspect one of the billion or so people who don't think Office is God's Gift to Whomever will figure out how to go ODF->pdf, or ->flash, or ->DHTML, or something even better.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
First Apple says they don't want their office app to compete with MSOffice, now Google says they don't want to compete with MSOffice. When will someone man up and compete? OpenOffice is nice but it has a HUGE number of flaws still. We NEED competition here.
Or openlazlo? Powerpoint exports? Guess we'll have to wait and see.
I know what I mainly need from an "office suite" is just a good word processor, one that doesnt lag 10 keystrokes behind me typing a simple letter.
I don't want to buy or install a whole office suite, just the apps I need. Why does it all have to be bundled with junk I dont care about?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I use the TonicPoint Viewer for Mac instead of OpenOffice or Powerpoint... it has way fewer troubles with fonts. If I open a Windows PowerPoint presentation in Mac PowerPoint, I usually end up seeing weird characters instead of bullets in lists... and equations with greek letters, etc. are almost always messed up.
So at least now I believe Google Presently will be a decent product.
Open Office is a fine replacement. For office. Google you want to kill microsoft? Build a web app that kills Quicken/Money and ultimately Turbo Tax et al with secure banking. Gnucash is trash. I'm sorry, I'm sure a lot of people worked very hard on it, but it is. The spreedsheet and wordprocessor apps are of extremely limited functionality, fine, Open Office is pretty rich, runs nearly anywhere. Kill the things which pin people to Microsoft. Office applications aren't one of those things anymore.
...And it wouldn't be hard. Just use an existing OSS database as the back-end solution (mySQL, PostgreSQL comes to mind) and then create a front-end that makes it easy for the layperson to set up tables and create queries, forms and reports. Considering the resources Google has at hand, this wouldn't be too difficult and would have a free stable core already available to them.
Similes are like metaphors
You said:"Internet access is rarely provided or flakey at best"
Could you please elaborate a bit further? You see the problem I have with your statement is I am now using EV-DO via my smart phone for high speed wireless broadband in major metropolitan areas, tethered to my machine here (PDA net). My plan is currently via US Sprint, although you can also go with Verizon and Cingular/AT&T has their own system called 3G. I can tell you from personal experience that EV-DO from my place here is 450 kilobit/sec download-anything but flakey and in select cities, like San Francisco EV-DO is even faster, supporting up to 1 megabit/sec download.
Oh and the upload speeds are lighting quick too, exceeding 150 kilobits/sec most of the time.
The fee? $15 a month-unlimited data, on top of a voice plan which is $40 per month (450 minutes), and if you run out of minutes, just use Skype...so using Google's stuff isn't so bad, really, depending on where you are in the country.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
Odd, everyone here is so certain that GOffice will compete with MS Office. Competition is needed here, but I'm not amused. Surely someone has an explanation? I've been TERRIBLY deceived by all of you!
I recently did a reasonably simple powerpoint presentation on a lower version of the microsoft software and all in all I thought it was great. Still, I think it is silly to have to rely on the system to make deliberations on whether to embed files based on a filesize limit setting in the configuration section.
Unfortunately I did a similar thing last night on a later version and to me it seemed much more of a struggle to do simple things with sound. The UI seems to have gotten worse and the system would not work with an embedded mp3. Now I get the feeling that it doesn't like embedded mp3's - thats fine. It didn't tell me anything though.. it just didn't work. In the end I had to admit defeat and force it to use an external file by manipulating that inane filesize option back down to a low size and readding.
http://base.google.com/base
I would have to see ads for competitors show up during presentation of my product.
"Freedom is untidy." —Donald Rumsfeld
Remember, kids: Violence and mayhem is proof of our nation's greatness. May the liberal antigun peaceniks never rob us of our untidy freedoms.
Didn't we already decide that Powerpoint was bad for learning?
/.
Evidently, Google doesn't read our beloved
A: Tonic Systems is a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management - Tonic Systems Builder, Tonic Systems Filter, Tonic Systems Transformer, Tonic Systems Viewer, and JarJar Links. Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools. *shudders* Had a horrible flashback there, read it as Jar Jar Binks.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I know Google has the public relations dollars, but one would think on Slashdot we'd be discussing
the many (IMHO far better) online office suites. I have a hard time looking at Google Docs
and thinking anyone would find it compares to say "Ajax13" ( http://www.ajax13.com/ ) or other
independent offerings.
Likewise, Google's webtop pales in comparison to far slicker applications like DesktopTwo
( http://www.desktoptwo.com/ ). -- which by the way uses a web based java version of OpenOffice
which is also slicker than any of Google's office apps.
I'm all for "free" and "freely distributed" web applications replacing the MS Office tax that
we're all forced to pay, but I'm also for the best man winning. And IMHO, Google's not exactly
deserving of the top spot here.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I like this kind of modest understatement. It understates the threat Google poses to Microsoft. Smart PR move IMHO.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Some people might get huffy and puffy at work if we swapped to Open Office, but I bet we would be able to manage it. But what would keep us on Windows is Quickbooks and our Remote Desktop server.
A good Quickbooks replacement that wasn't even free but ran on Linux, would go a long way toward us being able to ditch Windows.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I'm going to make a crazy guess here. Google will release product after product until the have almost all of the MS Office Suite covered. Most businesses won't use it though as the idea of putting their files up on some nebulous file cloud spooks them. They don't want corporate secrets in the hands of who knows who. Then Google will drop their bombshell: their office suite will be made to work ONLINE and OFFLINE (and still in a browser!) jumping the final hurdle for a business suite. On an even wilder note they may even release the source code claiming "see, even if we go out of business you can compile it yourself". Their online model will be supported by ads and their offline one will make money by selling support. The sound you hear is a thousand chairs flying into walls.
Based on my former experience at Google, I would say you have to add "interviewing candidates" to your list of tasks that employees spend a significant amount of time on.
Where's the "share this document" and "collaborate" features on ajax13?
The point is that presentation software is different from word processing. You need the program to be local on your computer so that you can make the presentation, in someone else's office, and without access to the net. For this to be useful, at the very least, google will have to make the slideshow part of this program available to live on your local PC. Maybe something analogous to Adobe Reader.
I do training frequently and use powerpoint as one of my tools. The laptop that I use most often doesn't even have wireless networking, because it doesn't need it. Often I train in places where the internet wouldn't be available at all without major hassles. I hope that google gets it right.
-- QED
I would like if Google add graph funtionality in their spreadsheet program. Also I have a feeling that google wiki would be a killer application
Who in their right mind would use this for any presentation that included anything remotely important? I think concerns about confidentiality will make this a hard sell to most corporations - those are the majority of the people who use PowerPoint.
That's a lot easier said than done.
I don't know if you've actually USED Docs but the last time I did--about 2-3 weeks ago--it didn't even have find & replace capability. All it had was "replace all" and even that had "experimental" warnings all over it and couldn't be undone.
So saying "All they need is a good API and a mechanism for plugins" when they can't even do find & replace is just a little silly, in my opinion.
Maybe. In about 2 years. At the earliest.
Hey ./ commenters, you're supposed to be IT experts. So pretend you know the difference between Java and Javascript.
But here's a tip: if you don't really know or care what the difference is, you can just say "Web 2.0" and all of the buzzword lovers will nod in silent understanding and tell you that Microsoft is doomed by Web 2.0.
when Docs doesn't work on my Linux + Firefox 2.0.0.3 setup (no cursor, can't type anything). Sheesh. Get the basics fixed first.
BSA: "Would you like a free Software Audit"? me: "No, thanks. My software is all Free".
I can't remember: is Google good or bad this week here on /.?
I will boycott Google's PowerPoint because they acquired it from Tonic Systems, which used to make a Java product called ... Jar Jar Links. Bad puns must not be encouraged.
I have used S5 for my presentations for a while now, and mainly for two reasons:
-
I almost always have an internet connection (or network connection) and thus can get at any of the presentations I need. I also can let the viewers see the presentation any time they want - just need that browser...
-
The ability to have both the printed and presentation form in one simple text document is so nice. Editing, updating, version control, etc. is just so much easier. And with the document being usable by all users, I don't need the "Windows" or "Mac" (and, rarely, the "Linux") compatible presentation system - I just do it all in one place and it just works.
I think Google may have something here. For most presentations (those that don't look like a 1990's MTV spot) this stuff just works. I just hope that they do something similar.Awesome, now I need my laptop to work, the projector to be in a good mood, _AND_ an internet connection... in a place i've probably never been until the presentation.
Things are hard enough as it is, but good grief!
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
ajaxWrite doesn't support Safari; I'm guessing it doesn't support Konqueror either. Nice to see that they recommend Firefox, however.
Don't you have better things to do than make assumptions about other people's posts? Maybe you don't. In any event, you add NOTHING to why I got modded down, but I sound more like an EV-DO commercial probably.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
is it no longer true that you don't need one?
.. until StarOffice came along. The suddenly he thought that "office" applications were great.
I remember years ago when Scott McNealy mocked MS about needing a word processor, forbid the use of PowerPoint at Sun and made a big show of handing out whiteboards and markers to his employees
That's a nice way of saying "oh, no, we wouldn't want it to be that bloated and complicated"
I never used seriously one of those fancy AJAX softare for more than 10 minues (except Google Maps) and my feeling was that even on a decent PC they are sluggishly slow, and lacking a lot of features. Now I read in many places that Google is a real contender for the office applications and I do not understand how that can be possible beside the mail.
It reminds me 1997 when we were supposed to have Corel Office in java: There was such a discrepancy between what I could read in the news and the true experience of using the betas.
Is there somebody here who used / is using these on-line softwares seriously and could tell me what I missed ?
It takes a number of Jar files and links them together into a sort of uberjar.
"We're not competing, we're just kids. MS Office rocks." That's a smart thing to say while you siphon off whatever customers you can. A much smarter thing than, say, Andreessen's famous "Netscape will reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers" statement. Evil or no evil, Google is definitely clever.
Desktoptwo seems to be using a VNC applet to render Acrobat and OpenOffice application GUIs, so no "web-based Java version of OpenOffice", just horribly compressed visuals in a laggy VNC window to a machine running OO.
Google trying to take the pie from M$ M$ trying to take the pie from adobe Why can't these companies really innovate ! I mean really !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
I've just been spending the last week moving all my documents to Google Docs and I think it's great.
I want to keep my docs forever
I moved everything over simply because my docs are spread across multiple machines some of which are ancient. I suddenly found myself wanting an ancient document that was stored on a laptop that didn't have any Internet connection. Luckily it still worked but it was a game getting the docs to a more modern PC. With Google docs I won't care what media the docs stored on, nor what computer or OS.
Backups
Sure I can all hear you smugly saying just get it off your backups but in those days I'd probably of used a plate sized floppy disk and would now be wondering where I insert the thing into a modern PC. Now I don't have to care about backups as they do it for me.
Accessibility
I can access all my files from any computer, any OS, anywhere in the world (as long as I have some form of Internet connection).
Sharing
I can keep my docs private or give access to specific people. I can also make them public if there is anyone out there sorry enough to read my ramblings.
Collaborate
I can work with others on the same documents.
Permanence
OK Google might not be here for ever but I bet they'll be here longer than MS and certainly longer than any of my PC's will last.
Features
I'm one of those users who probably only uses 80% of the features in Word so a reduced feature set doesn't matter to me. The formatting features are roughly the same as those offered by web based email systems.
Is it perfect
No - it can be a bit clunky in places and it seems to prefer shorter documents to larger ones. I figure it will probably get better over time and I was happy to switch with just the benefits as they stand at the moment. Oh, did I mention it was free?
yet it doesn't support safari, konqueror, or firefox 2.0 running under linux either.
thanks but no thanks. think GOffice will work much better. People other then windows users are able to use it. Sort of the key point I would think.
Time to take a class on reading comprehension, bro... Seriously. If you're going to be a fanboy shill, at least try to make sense.
1. You put quotes around something that certainly wasn't a quote. You do realize they're called "quotation marks" for a reason, right?
2. I didn't say plugins are a bad idea
3. I didn't say that they CAN'T implement find & replace
So basically, you misunderstood, it seems, each and every sentence I wrote.
Are you always this dense or do you save it all for us on slashdot?
Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations.
Am I the only one who thinks it's incredibly risky to have all your documents and such out on the internet, dependent upon the success of some provider? Not to mention that the provider could hold your documents hostage.
Back in 2000, I stored a bunch of documents on a web service. They said they were bought out or something and would delete all documents within a matter of days. How did they let me know? They had my email address, but that would have made too much sense. Instead they posted the notice on the web site. So, anyone who rarely went back to the web page would miss the announcement. When I eventually did go back and saw the notice too late, all my stuff had been wiped out.
I'd wish /. editors would use unambiguous terms, such as months, quarters or the like. I live in the Southern hemisphere, and whenever I read something that mentions seasons I must check to where it's referring, and if it's to the Northern hemisphere, mentally translate the northern season name into its southern equivalent. Not nice, really.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Whilst we're on the subject of Google take a look at the Amnesty International page about them.
Ok, so all pages at http://www.tonicsystems.com/ link to a Google page. But you can search tonicsystems.com/ and click on the cache link and see some of the products they offered and what they used to do.
Gliffy is a great web based Visio replacement. How long until this gets wrapped up in google office?
http://www.gliffy.com/
I hope that they included some form of: 1. IM or VOIP in the same page as the presentation 2. A presenters view vs. attendee view 3. The ability to distribute invites. 4. Ability to make the presentation download able if necessarily 5. Maybe embed media from Google images or Google video in the presentation... and have accessible media stock. 6. Publish the presentation or link it to a Google group along with other docs and etc. 7. Maybe purchase technology from companies like VNC or logmein.com for remote desktop control (support, training, etc) just to check the box when compared to webex. 8. Web based creation tool kit that can be used to create presentations online with out need for MS Powerpoint. With a nice AJAX drag and drop interface that has the ability to change and edit slides in the middle of a presentation without interruption by using a new window or tabbed interface. 8b. Be able to share the ability to present and edit. ie. one person can do the talking while another is making edits. 9. Ability to create a follow up questionnaire with links to additional information. Then they would have a webex killer. That would be my wish list :) any thoughts? If Google needs a dreamer, send me a job offer LOL, cuz the sky is the limit when you have as much money as they do.
If Google doesn't do it, sourceforge it and lets make it happen. Unfortunately i wont be any help since i have no idea how to program.. Just a dreamer here :)
You're making some huge mistakes. First, the cost of office software is nothing for a corporation, compared to its other expenses (taxes, salaries, hardware, office bills and so on and so on).
$200 saved per employee is $200 saved. Big corporations are as sensitive to that as little corporations.
Second, those Google Apps are suitable for some purposes, but for heavy or advanced usage, they're totally unfit.
Neither is Microsoft Office; Microsoft Office is merely bloated and slow. Most people don't know what "heavy and advanced usage" is (you sure don't), and that is why Google Apps will be good enough for them (Google needs to do a little more work but not a lot), just like Microsoft Office is good enough for them.
So far we're looking at a bunch of online toys trying to pretend they're Office. They will replace Office exactly as the "web OS" sites will replace Windows.
MS Office and MS Windows are already dead, they just don't know it yet. Google isn't the only thing that's killing them, but it is certainly one nail of many in their coffin.