Google Launches Powerpoint Competition, Web Ads for Mobile Devices

fullstop writes "Google has finally launched their online presentation tool to complete its office offerings at Google Docs." Relatedly several users have also mentioned that Google plans to start selling ads for cell phone-targeted websites. "The company said that its new product, AdSense for Mobile, would establish a cellphone advertising network in which Google would match ads with the content of mobile Web pages, much as it does online. Other Internet giants, including Yahoo and AOLTime Warner, as well as some start-ups, have also created advertising networks tailored for mobile phones."

Comments

Not shabby

[TrippTDF]

The Presentation tool isn't bad- simple interface, but there's a limited number of themes, and it looks like no way to create your own, other than uploading an existing PowerPoint deck. It also doesn't support transitions. However, the integrated sharing ability is what really make this a winner. If anyone is shaking in their boots, it should be WebEx, as this makes it much easier to view a deck than using their software.

Still, it seems that the adoption of Google's tools is pretty slow. Most people I talk to are still skeptical of them.

Re:Not shabby

[darthflo]

Most people I talk to are still skeptical of them.

I agree that it is a rather nice product, however I still belong to the skepticists for some reasons:

• Privacy (i.e. Google sees everything I do)
• Not liking the idea of losing all my docs if Google decides to be bankrupt some day (I know I can store all my docs locally, but that'd defeat most of GDocs advantages
• Features (i.e. GDocs "is teh sux" when feature-compared to OOo or even MSO 2007)
• Web apps may be nice, but they're made much more than they are. Remember moving away from dumb terminals not too long ago?
• Availability (Thanks to WWAN and good mobile networks, I am seldomly disconnected, but I'd like to be able to have my stuff handy when abroad or in a cave (powering my notebook with a miniature nuclear reactor (the cave's deep enough not to let any GSM/802.11/CDMA radio in or Pu radiation out, no threat to National Security® there)))

Re:Not shabby

[pato101]

The thing comes with a "save as zip" option, which saves the html, images and javascript files, cleanly classified into folders, that allow the presentation to be shown completely offline.

Re:Not shabby

[Rhaban]

It also doesn't support transitions. Actually, I think that's a good thing. If there's one think I hate more than poorly designed powerpoint presentations, it's poorly design powerpoint presentations with over-animated special effect transitions.

As you can see...

[AKAImBatman]

...the example presentation is Proprietary and Confidential. So don't go spreading this link across the Internet! Especially not on one of those high traffic sites like Slashdot.

[...]

(Oops)

too risky, no multi-display presenter tools

[SuperBanana]

Google has finally launched their online presentation tool to complete its office offerings at Google Docs."

Why this will never take off:

First- no presenter in their right mind wants to rely on the internet to deliver a presentation. We tell people to have a copy ready on at LEAST one other kind of media, especially if they're giving a big talk. I know people who spread important presentations across multiple media, which is spread across their luggage when traveling. Ie, the presentation is on their USB key in their pocket, but also on a CD in case the key is broken (for example, maybe the plane ride is bumpy and the seatbelt causes the drive's connector to snap off.) We even have them put it on their webmail account in case they lose *everything* for some reason.

But...do the presentation requiring second-to-second internet access to work? Bwahahahahahaahaa.

Second- even if you can export it (for example, as a PDF), very few if any PDF viewers support dual-monitor layout. Powerpoint and Keynote, the biggest presentation tools, both support a "presenter display" on the second monitor; you can see things like a preview of the next slide, a presentation timer+clock, your notes for the current slide- or all of the above.

Re:Not so sure...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It does not have to win over 50% to make a difference. All it [google or any competition of MsOffice] has to do is to reach a critical mass. Currently people keep buying MsOffice because this is the only product that is guaranteed to be accepted by others they work with. And MsOffice freely changes file formats, look and feel, rendering engines, so that others can't interoperate with it. If there is a critical mass of people who routinely return the doc sent by email saying, "Please save it in pdf/office97/... format and send it back to me". And if they get docs in odf and MsOffice has trouble rendering exactly as intended, people will start thinking about office software. Once a critical mass is reached, things will very quickly settle down into an common medium.

What that critical mass is, I don't know. I would speculate it is around 10% of the market. That 10% will routinely interact with at least 20% of the MS-office customers.

A good old example of this is the EBCDIC vs ASCII battle. Old IBM mainframes and their teminals used to use Extended binary coded decimal Isomething Csomething and IBM used to sell these terminals, tape drives, modems etc at a nice premium. The non-proprietary open standard ASCII languished for a long long time. Then when the things turned around, IBM had to adopt ASCII eventually and the EBCDIC peripheral market, if it still exists, is nowhere near the ASCII in terms of marketshare.

OMG I am telling the whole world, how old I am. People think I am posting it while waiting for Social security checks at the post office!!!

Re:Offline work?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Offline work? Yeah, you can make it with the Google app, then download it and work on it offline...but then, why bother to use the Google app?"

This may not apply to you, but I like it because I work from several different computers throughout the day. Google Docs is a nice centralized place to work on documents. I can start something at home, go to work, work on it some more, go back home, do even more, etc. I don't have to tote the docs around on a thumb-drive or something. It's valuable to me, so much so that I don't even bother installing Office anymore. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Online collaborations

[jpflip]

A large number of the complaints on this thread seem to amount to "I would never trust the internet for a presentation! Give me my trusty laptop any day!" I think these folks are missing the point of this product.

I work on a scientific collaboration that spans several institutions across the country. We use weekly teleconferences for specialized subgroups and occasional online meetings of the whole group to keep coordinated on what each other are doing. For these occasions we're always dealing with distributing presentations over the internet in a reasonable way. We usually post PDFs or HTML on the web, but we've had problems in the past with our own servers going down during telecons. We're also often editing our talks at the last minute, and we can have problems where someone downloads their PDFs before one of us posts his or her last changes.

For collaborations like ours this is a very intriguing product. I trust Google's servers more than my group's, to be honest, and we can always post backups on our own server. A consistent-looking presentation that I could easily edit right up to the last minute (or even collaboratively) is appealing. I grant that there are other solutions which may be better in some cases and that I'd probably never use this for a conference talk, but it's still intriguing for groups in our situation.

Re:Not so sure...

[LMacG]

Interchange Code. But thanks for the chuckle, fellow old guy.

Re:Offline work?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Alrighty. 'll give yout he pros and cons version:

Pros:

- Typically I work across 3 different computers. Work, Home desktop, Home laptop. Also, from time to time, I'm asked to use other machines at work. GDocs is central and easy to get to. For this reason, I often use it for scratch stuff. For example: I recently purchased a computer. I created a spreadsheet at home with all the components + prices I wanted. Then, at work, one of my coworkers told me about a brand of product I'd probably like better. I spent a few minutes on my lunch break looking into it, agreed with him, and modified that spreadsheet. (It wouldn't have occured to me to upload that spreadsheet from home to my server since I didn't expect to want to modify it from work.)

- I can 'publish' documents, which means they basically go up on the web as HTML and people can view them. I get a kick out of this because it's like quickly putting up a web page. I can write out a doc, attach pics, etc, and just hit 'Publish', then I get a link I can send people.

- I've never personally used this, but GDocs supports collaboration. Other people can edit the documents if you enable this. You can also restrict who can look at it, and there's even mention of using RSS propogation for it. I haven't personally used that but I imagine there's some interesting uses for this.

- GDocs automatically saves every few seconds. That makes it hard to lose a lot of data if your net connection suddenly dies. It also shows you the changes/revisions you've made over the life of the document. As a matter of fact, I just checked, and all those revisions from stuff I've written last Xmas are there. (I think Word has a similar feature, but I'm not familiar with it.)

- You can Google Search through your docs. I've never really used that, but that feature is absolutely killer with email.

- If you're a fan of how GMail organizes its emails, you're in for a treat. In my opinion, it's a lot more intuitive than storing files in a folder structure. (Without losing the benefits of the file structure.) Actually, I think this is what Microsoft had in mind when they were talking about the new file system for Vista that they never got around to finishing.

Cons:

- Yeah... if the net breaks, GDocs is useless. I've bumped into that a couple of times.

- This shouldn't be a 'con' so much as just a little warning to you. I don't do a lot of formal docs with GDocs. I don't know how effective its page layout tools are. If you need to do something that's print sensitive, I cannot guarantee you that it'd satisfactorally replace Office.

- Excel's interface is definitely more repsonsive than GDoc's Spreadsheets. For simple stuff it's good, but I've ached for Excel on more than one occasion.

- I can export as XLS, DOC, etc. But I cannot guarantee you the quality of the save. Since I personally haven't tried it, I listed this as a con instead of a pro.

- If you hate how GMail stores its docs, you won't like this much.

- Microsoft's integration is a lot better. You can copy/paste from an Excel Spreadsheet to a Word Doc, and it'll retain the cells, formulas, etc. No such luck with Google Docs.

- Office's UI is just more intuitive. GDocs' isn't so bad it's unusable, but I do ache for it occasionally. Spell check, for example, is a lot friendlier in Office. It's rather basic in GDocs. Oh well.

I hope that's interesting to you. :)