Google Spreadsheets
I am here to say that I am bored with Google releasing products that nobody actually wants. Google Spreadsheets is the latest example, but it’s not hard to find lots of others in their stable.
As usual, reporters are making this into a clash of the titans instead of evaluating it for what it is. This idea isn’t new, it was done many years ago and never really caught on. The basic technologies that are available to make something like this happen today aren’t much different than when Num Sum tried this in 1998, so it’ll be interesting to see what value Google can possibly add here aside from the heat and light of their halo effect.
I have a bias here (not as a Google competitor but as an Excel fan), but my sense is that any web-based spreadsheet is going to have a hard time competing with the next version of Excel. David Gainer’s Excel 2007 product blog has an awesome discussion of what’s coming up — after a few staggeringly mediocre releases (why did anyone pay actual money for Excel 2003?), the Excel product team is really thinking outside the box and adding some amazing new features.
So…if Google’s intention was to jab Microsoft, it’s not going to work. Google will probably get some users who don’t use Excel today, but serious spreadsheet users are not going to use any Web-based spreadsheet. Setting aside the issue of whether a Web-based spreadsheet can be responsive enough and contain the hundreds of features that spreadsheet power users demand, there’s the very important question of who gets to paw through your sensitive business data when it’s stored online.
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I love Excel as a long time user, and this isn’t going to pull me away at all. And absolutely, there’s plenty of hype. This isn’t an Excel killer.
But then again, Jeffrey, I’m happy to bet that by this time next year, Microsoft will be forced to roll out a light-weight, free version of Excel to compete. I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo feels it has to do the same.
I suspect there are plenty of people with very basic needs that a browser-based spreadsheet can handle just well. And despite being an Excel fan, I’ve never had an easy way to share the files between a coworker.
Google’s not the first to give this type of solution, but it’s out there now, and I know I’ll make use of it especially for my sharing needs. I absolutely believe people want this type of product, and if they haven’t used it before, it’s simply because it’s not been offered by a company with a halo effect that helps bring new attention to existing solutions.
So not an Excel killer but an Excel nibbler — and those nibbles just lock people in more tightly with Google, people that Microsoft really doesn’t want to be losing.
You have a way to share Excel files with co-workers today — email.
I could envision Googsheets (coin it!) getting to become a thorn in the side of MSFT but it’s a serious long shot. I’m with you that it will provide something for people who wouldn’t ordinarily use a spreadsheet, but corporations don’t respond competitively to “nibbles” and I wouldn’t expect Microsoft (or Yahoo!) to do so either.
In fact, I’d be willing to bet folding money that in a year’s time, Sheets will take its place alongside Goog Base and Goog Finance in the “isn’t that interesting” file.
You’re back! While I appreciated the family shots (congrats btw) and your local restauranteur, good to see back on the product critique wagon.
Yep, I email right now. But I’ve also used wikis and collaborative documents, and the difference is amazing. Emailing something back and forth feels clunky in comparison.
Anyway, bet’s on Jeffrey. Call it a round of drinks or something, but let’s check in same time next year and see if Google Spreadsheets is best friends with Google Catalogs (ie, forgotten) or Gmail. I won’t take a bet on whether it will be open to the entire public, though! :)
I don’t think this is an Excel killer, which is also partly why I think it has a chance of becoming valuable. A less than power user spreadsheet could be plenty useful for less than power user uses including things like: managing bills between spouses, making lists, managing project tasks, etc. That’s the kind of stuff people user Excel for today, and would easily transfer to the web regardless of how many power user functions Google integrates into the application.
In fact, I bet power users will create online spreadsheets for their non-power user friends. And, just because it’s been done before doesn’t really matter if the target market for the service never found out about it.
Okay, sure, but again, all this has been available on the Web for some time.
This is not about competing with excel at all. if that were the case, they wouldnt have chosen to provide the facility of importing and exporting spreadsheet data using the .xls format.
This is more about providing a quick online collaborating tool which folks can use for non-critical stuff. Enterprise users will not use this product at all, because it’s not meant for them. why would they want to store their private data on google’s servers ?
But now look at the scenario when you’re sitting in a cyber cafe, and the comp doesnt have any spreadsheet app installed. Now, it’s so easy to just loging to your google account …. do some stuff online, download the data in .xls format, and subsequently, if you want, delete the online version. cool and easy. see the usefulness here? it’s meant for such situations. in any case, if they release an api for it, developers will integrate it with google calendar, and then it’ll become an even more useful tool.
Google is not competing with MS on feature-completeness, but on changing the paradigm.
This product enhances MS Excel’s capabilities and brings it on to the web with google’s massive computing infrastructure backing it to give it stability.
Well, that premise is wrong on the face of it, and you only have to look back to the history of Excel itself to see why. When Excel debuted there had been one and only one piece of hit software for the PC — Lotus 1-2-3. At that time there was a sense that Lotus’ domination would never be toppled. Excel did it, and not because of a dazzling GUI or because of some radical new paradigm in spreadsheets — they did it because it was possible to convert to and from the 1-2-3 spreadsheet format, so trying it out was a no brainer.
So: providing an import-export feature isn’t evidence that they aren’t competing with Excel; in fact, import-export is the #1 feature you’d implement if you were interesting in displacing an entrenched incumbent.
“Google’s massive computing infrastructure” sounds like another synonym for “Google’s halo effect” (that is to say, it’s not where the value lies here). If Num Sum didn’t get adoption because they weren’t smart enough to figure out how to set up enough servers (which definitely wasn’t the case), then that point would make sense.
It’s obvious that they’re not competing on feature-completeness, the only question (which is the case with all software) is how few features can they add to make this viable.
A few people have pointed to the use case of two little league coaches collaborating over their team’s lineup using Googsheets as a good example of how the collaboration function would change the game. So I tried this using Googsheets last night. It worked OK, except it’s not possible to format baseball averages (like “.372″) properly using Googsheet’s number formatting. This is obviously an edge case, but it seems to me that a spreadsheet’s feature set is a bundle of thousands of these cases, and you don’t have to be a power use to run into deal-killing limitations.