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February 4, 2007
GooPoint Completes Google's Anti-Office Suite
A few intrepid spelunkers of Google Docs have seemingly found that a Google-delivered presentation tool is nigh. Assuming so, that completes Google's free, hosted suite of anti-office apps, with Gmail/GCalendar, Writely, Google Spreadsheet, and, now, GooPoint (or "Presently" as Google will seemingly call it) all now available and pointed, at the low end anyway, at Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively.The upshot? While critics will be quick to point out that none of these apps are the feature equivalent (or even the 20% equivalent) of the Microsoft counterpart, I frankly don't care. For my entirely self-serving purposes when I have to do a quick doc, run a spreadsheet, more often than not I use the available Google tool. And, as I have mentioned here many times, I live in Gmail for email (so up the damn quote already!).
Anyway, it does make you hmmm. Because despite Eric Schmidt's protestations a year or so ago that Google had no designs on Microsoft's productivity tools, his Google has delivered ... a version of Microsoft's core suite.
What was it my friend Marc said eons ago about the effect his Navigator would have on Windows, something about reducing it to a poorly debugged set of device drivers? Like many smart predictions in tech, it eventually happened -- albeit a decade later than the prognosticator thought. Better late than never.
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I open every .doc I receive using Google Docs but still download all the .xls files to open with Excel. I guess I still need the power and familiarity of Excel, which isn't the case with Word.
I agree that habit and inertia are big factors but I think NEED can bring change. Very few of us have experience of collaborating realtime on a document or spreadsheet which is one of the advantages here and, consequently 'collaboration'is not compelling enough to force us to change our habits. However, as a divorced Dad it has been a fantastic way to help my teenage son on his school projects or provide comments on his essays etc. This has got me thinking about ways to apply this in the workplace. Change will come. Microsoft need to keep their eye on it.
I guess I have "inertia." I still use WordPerfect. It's the betamax of word processing: technically superior (to Word or Docs), but was marketing deficient.
Seriously though, I use Word instead of WP at work however because I pretty much have to - it's my office standard (yeah I could use something else and write the file as .doc -- but I don't want to have to worry it'll look different to Word users). If you're just doing stuff for yourself I suppose you can do whatever you want, but Google Docs will never supplant Word in the corporation, or if it does it will be a VERY slow uphill creep.
The large base of office users who have been paying hundreds of dollars for an office suite they only use
The question that springs to my mind though, is why will Zoho and Google Docs etc. win as an alternative where OpenOffice has (somewhat) failed and I think the answer is because these new alternatives are web-based. Being web-based it is easier to convert in parallel while running office on the desktop rather than ripping out one suite for another
This is how I have been seeing the adoption happen, with my own use, our internal use and with Omnidrive users (I am the CEO of Omnidrive and we recently integrated Zoho).
For whatever it matters, the presentation tool was discovered by GoogleSystem blog: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-presently.html.
msft has a web based office. they just don't need to "spring" it on the world yet. but when folks (other than the top 100 bloggers) desire web based spreadsheets they will be there. bloggers (not pk) have to get out of their own uber geekiness and see things from aunite Kay's perspective in Toepka.
Google Office lacks the "features" of (a) off-line mode, and (b) privacy. The former may become less of an issue as the always-connected infrastructure matures, but privacy-concerns are only going to grow from here on out. More than a few people are going to balk at the idea of Google building an integrated, permanent database of all of their data, data which future AI's will analyze and do who-knows-what with in the coming decades.
In my twenty year career of buying computers for home use that are occasionally used for business purposes: mainly in publishing resumes -- I have ended up buying Microsoft Office three times, once for the Mac in 1991 and twice for Windows in 1997 and 2007. Luckily my latest version of office is the cheapest, home and school, sold in Canada for $150.
It's still a ripoff, but the watered down version of Word that comes with Windows XP doesn't have much in the way of formatting features.
But I'm definitely in favour of using GMail for most of my wordprocessing power....and I have poked around in the Writely website -- I just haven't made it a big habit like Gmail,
like many smart people you are "too" visionary. what is the number 2 piece of software at Amazon? its OFFICE. Presumably all of these folks have internet access. Never. Never underestimate two words in technology. HABIT and INERTIA.
regards