Alys Woodward, Angela Ashenden, Christopher Harris-Jones, David Bradshaw
Google to launch a simple online spreadsheet
Google has begun offering access to a "test" version of a simple online spreadsheet. You can sign up at its website and then you have to wait until Google emails you to give you access - and Google isn't saying when this will be. But from the demo, it is clear that the emphasis is on collaboration, with multiple users being able to view and work on a spreadsheet simultaneously. Initial functionality is far from comprehensive - for example, there are no charts yet. Spreadsheets can be exported and imported using Excel or CSV file formats. Comment: This application is coming at spreadsheet functionality from quite a different angle, that of realtime collaboration, which Microsoft cannot easily duplicate. It also hits a key pain point of Microsoft Excel, where data integrity problems arise when Excel spreadsheets are passed in their entirety from user to user, with subsequent users often not fully understanding the calculations in complex models, and creating errors in the spreadsheet. Enabling multiple users to collaborate on a spreadsheet in real time should help overcome this type of problem, although how Google handles multiple users editing a single cell at the same time is not clear.It's a pity that Google has not taken this opportunity to use ODF for importing and exporting spreadsheets. While this open standard does not have much traction yet, support from an organisation such as Google would give it a significant boost. It would also offer greater potential for interchanging spreadsheets including the formulae, unlike CSV format which is limited to just the data.Judging by the way that Google is going about the launch, this "test" does not seem to be aimed at the corporate market. This seems odd, because this type of collaboration capability is far better suited to organisations than individuals. Google may be taking the view that the way to get corporate adoption is first through "viral" marketing to individual users, not the IT department. Of course, storing corporate data on non-corporate Google servers will also be an issue.The new service sits well with Google's recent purchase of Writely in March. Writely is an online word processor that also has collaboration capabilities. Again, we believe that Writely's collaboration facilities are of most interest to corporations.We've been saying for a while that corporations will be looking seriously at their corporate desktop computers with a view to reducing costs. Microsoft Office is one of the few applications that still resides on most corporate desktops, blocking any radical rethink. Google seems to be inching towards providing a replacement to Office, and this is a step along the way, but it's still a long way off. Google has gone very quiet on its collaboration with Sun over OpenOffice, and our suspicion is that this project will take a long time to reach fruition anyway (though in the mean time, it does help to keep Microsoft wondering what Google is up to!).
