Google Launches Online Spreadsheet System

Accommodate Students writes "In a move that is sure to cause even more discussion of Google's intentions to go head-to-head with Microsoft in the Office Suite arena, they have launched a spreadsheet. AP is reporting this as 'Google further invades its rival's territory.' You can share spreadsheets with other users and can chat while you're editing -- multiplayer spreadsheets! It can read both CSV and XLS formats." More from the article: "Google is targeting Office, which generated $2.95 billion in sales and $2.09 billion in profit in Microsoft's third quarter ended March 31. Microsoft plans a new release this year and is trying to get Office into more consumers' hands at a cheaper price while persuading businesses to buy higher-priced versions."

This is not invading MS territory.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

The online office & office application are different markets, if Google released a downloadable, installable competitor to office, they would be competing with OO.org & MS Office.

This is expanding into a new market area before MS gets there (whatever did happen to office live anyway?)

Re:This is not invading MS territory.

[xusr]

It's not 1999 anymore. There are plenty of people that will be happy do ditch "expensive proprietary" MS Office for "free open" GoogleOffice. Broadband, the ubiquity of the laptop/handheld/cellphone means a changing market, ripe for Google or anyone with enough money and public eye to take the office crown.

Re:This is not invading MS territory.

[kneeslasher]

For knocking up a quick spreadsheet (which is what 90% of home Excel users are doing), surely this is ideal and removes the need for (buying) Excel? For such simple uses, the online and offline markets are as one.

Watch me slip towards giving Google all my information: as a personal example, I know it'd be handy for keeping a record of my yearly finances, for which full blown Excel is frankly overkill. I have to say, as a first application, they did well to pick a spreadsheet.

Specifically, this would be a boon for OS X users since Apple's current offerings in iWork (Pages and Keynote), do not extend to a spreadsheet program.

AJAX is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be ironic that the very technology that M$ came up with could be their biggest weakness to date? After all, it's tech like AJAX that is allowing web based apps that can more closely approximate their native bretheren. This doesn't speak well for Java though, since IT was supposed to be the language/environment that brought "light" productivity to the desktop over the net.

Then again, despite what Google claims (and their fanboys regurgitate), Google is an evil company whose primary objective is to use everyone elses content to generate revenue (hmmm, they launch this service today, coincidence?). I for one need no part of that. Let's hope that other companies can take advantage of upcoming technologies to create a richer set of offerings. Having two monopolies (one heavy native and one light web based) isn't much better than having one.

Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS?

[Homology]

This article is trying to get accross the point that Google is targeting MS Office but in my opinion I think that Google is targeting MS Windows and fleshing out their applications suites before they push for launching a user space or OS type web project. Perhaps all you'll need pretty soon to be productive is a machine with Linux installed & merely a good web browser?

Only if you don't mind having no privacy and always need a working Internet connection to do any work.

Who in their right mind would use this?

[alecto]

Why would anyone store their documents on any outside corporation's server, much less one with a demonstrated committment and ability to mine those documents?

as the MIT $100 laptop

[itsthebin]

rolls out to the developing world , they will be a perfect thin client for these applications.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The Web Browser Is the UI for Google's WebOS

[MOBE2001]

Throw your OS away. The only application you need is a dedicated browser (Google will provide one soon) and an internet connection to Google. No hard drives are necessary.

Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS?

[i-neo]

Only if you don't mind having no privacy and always need a working Internet connection to do any work.

You will probably be able to do your work locally with your browser since it is possible for AJAX application to delay data sending. Therefore it shouldn't be a problem for Spreadsheet or Word like application.

Re:Who in their right mind would use this?

[GweeDo]

Because not all my spreadsheets belong to the company I work for? I have plenty that are personal. Some that track Children's Church attendence, some that track my weight loss...stuff like that. I would much prefer to use some online spreadsheet then launch OO.org each time I want to edit those. Will this replace Excel at work? Nope, atleast not yet ;)

Re:The Real Strategy

[Haeleth]

one of the standard operating procedures for MS is to keep changing the file formats, macro language syntax etc continually to keep moving the "targets".

BS.

Microsoft does not break backwards compatibility on every release. The day Microsoft breaks backwards-compatibility is the day millions of businesses decide not to upgrade. This is not what Microsoft wants. Which is why the next Office will continue to support the old binary file formats perfectly alongside the new XML formats.

How well does it work in practice? Pretty damn well. Just this weekend I took a spreadsheet written and saved in Excel XP, opened it in Excel 97, wrote a complex macro, saved it again, emailed it back to the guy with Excel XP, and my macro worked perfectly for him first time. If Microsoft kept breaking the file format and macro language the way you claim, clearly that would not have been possible.

Please, if you want to criticise Microsoft, pick on a criticism that's actually true, like their unfair business practices, their laughable security record, or (clutches at straws) their ugly GUI or something. But don't criticise their compatibility record -- because it's among the best in the industry. (Not that that's saying much.)

YES YES, 85% of the users will love this

[gelfling]

Look at MS Works - its spreadsheet will handle 85% of common usage. And then they turn around and make the file format incompatible with Excel just so that if you use Excel somewhere else like work or school you're forced to use it in place of Works as well. It's a shill. But functionally Works spreadsheet is entirely suitable for most applications. Google can fill this niche and if they allow you to archive and manage multiple versions then it would be fine.

Re:This is not invading MS territory.

[Down_in_the_Park]

All the people paying for office are businesses - they can't afford their office to be down (through network problems or google problems).

And aside from this concern, they for sure can't affort to have business critical data stored on a server they have no control over.

Even as a private user I would like to keep my data and have a local backup. While gmail is nice, I won't use it for sth. important or mission critical.

Re:as the MIT $100 laptop

[wanerious]

Yep, I think there's more to this than the myopic view of the American market. As a greater share of the world comes online, this will basically commoditize MicroSoft's software and shove it into a niche market. A very large percentage of average users would appreciate an easy, free spreadsheet they can access from anywhere and share with anyone else, including schools and nascent community internet centers in developing parts of the world. Maybe Google is really thinking globally and long-term. In 5 years it really could be the dominant method of casual information exchange.

privacy in the U.S.

[hawkeesk8]

I am becoming less and less enthused about keeping my personal mail and most especially my personal financial information on a google server in the U.S. where the government feels that they have every right to rummage through my things.

Re:Who in their right mind would use this?

[oneandoneis2]

You might just as well ask: Why would anyone store their email on any outside corporation's server, much less one with a demonstrated committment and ability to mine those documents?

Answer: Because they find it convenient to do so. Hence the immense success of hotmail, yahoo, gmail. . .

Re:Bad Example

[Skythe]

That is exactly why I want a full-blown Excel. Do you really want to do your finances online? Have a copy of that residing on google's server where it is stored or "cached"? They put out these services to aggregate your life, to advertize to you. You are there to make money, that's all they care about. Your privacy be damned.

Personally, i think your being far too paranoid here - reach for your tin foil hat, put it on, and take a few deep breaths.

Considering the fact that google is an information technology company, i feel relativly assured that they store my 'data' - email or whatever in a perfectly secure manner. What reassures me is knowing how much shit a company can get in if they loose or missuse such information. Your insurance company keeps all sorts of tabs on you about that sort of details, and yes, they are actually there to make money too (in fact, most corporations are *shock horror*).

I mean, seriously, good luck for the guy thats going to watch me sit down, remember my email and manage to somehow memorise my random numeric password while at the same time knowing that i store my financial data on google spreadsheets.

I already signed up for the beta thing, and yes, i personally can see myself using it. At uni next semester, for my accounting unit, instead of going into excel, making a nice spreadsheet and then having to go into gmail to mail it to myself so i can work on it at home, i can simply visit this site, do my stuff and click 'save'. Easy.

Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS?

[nodrew]

You will probably be able to do your work locally with your browser since it is possible for AJAX application to delay data sending. Therefore it shouldn't be a problem for Spreadsheet or Word like application.

Ahh, but now you're talking about Google developing non-web-based applications. The whole purpose of "AJAX" style application development is that you can have the advantages of server-side processing while maintaining what appears to be a fluid working environment on the client side. As we all know a standard web page is maintained through links and posts, each one sends a request and processes some data which is then responded to with another page. In Ajax this same thing happens, but JavaScript is used to send the request to the server and then only a portion of the page is updated / changed.

For AJAX to work in this way though it requires that it to connect to a server for more input. By isolating it away from the server, you are talking about downloaded an application module, we'll call this a "Javlash" or maybe a "Flava". In any case, we're talking about a completely different application structure, as all of its processing would have to be local in order to "turn off" the internet connection to type a word document. In order to hand more complicated procedures "like file saving" it just isn't possible to do this in JavaScript. Or at least it is not plausable.

The other piece of the equation which dictates that an Internet connection would be necessary is that on the initial page load, in order for the application to load, it would need to connect to the Internet at least once, so what is the point of designing a dynamic web app that connects only once at the beginning. That's just more hassle then it is worth. Might as well just use a client side only application that will connect to the Google servers for collaboration features if you want a standalone mode.

Personally, as a developer of dynamic web apps, I would never want to run mission critical applications out of a web browser, as I know just how unstable all of the major browsers are, from Firefox to Safari to Internet Explorer, especially when running heavily JavaScripted pages that persist for extended periods of time. I would rather use something like OO.o that gives me all of the features I need and allows me to keep track of my own data.

Re:This is not invading MS territory.

[Anonymous Coward]

add to the fact that if they decide to develope this app for office environments, they could have an Office competitor. Just buy the google software, set it up on a server, and boom, your 100+ Office site license no longer needs to be renewed. All from one centrally located and administrated server. Trust me, not having to do Office repairs and installs is worth alot to the average sys admin.

Google doesn't need a Desktop Office application.

[vhogemann]

They'll make their API public, and them someone at the Gnumeric or OO.o Calc team can quickly devellop a plugin to publish and open the files directly from the web. The KDE team can devellop a KIOSlave for filesystem transparecy, and Gnome folks can do the same for GnomeFS!

Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS?

[argStyopa]

Perhaps all you'll need pretty soon to be productive is a machine with Linux installed & merely a good web browser?

You're omitting something: broadband.

There are a lot of people out there with computers and only crappy/no connections.

However, it's worth pointing out (as I'm sure Google has recognized), the VALUE of the non-connected market, in terms of productivity software, is not so great. Maybe Google simply concedes this to MS?

(FWIW I agree with your extrapolation.)

Re:The Real Strategy

[Kadin2048]

Huh? What you're saying doesn't make any sense. Of course Microsoft's own products have backwards compatibility. But the point is that they continue to change the formats going forward, with every new release, and then do not publish any documentation on the formats.

So if I build a product that I want to interoperate with Excel, and it uses the 1997 format, I'm okay for a while. But in the next release of Excel, by default it's going to produce documents that my application cannot read. Every time somebody sends me one, I'm going to have to reply back and ask them to do a "Save As" and give it to me in Excel-97 instead of Excel-xx, where xx is this year's flavor. In short, it's not backwards compatibility of Microsoft products that's in question at all, it's the "forwards compatibility" of other products which have to be compatible with MS' latest offerings in order to remain competitive, because of its dominance in the market.

Thus anyone who wants to make a seamlessly interoperable product has to expend a ridiculous amount of energy and manpower, constantly reverse-engineering Microsoft's latest formats. The work required to change the format is asymmetrical: on Microsoft's end (where they have all the specifications) it's quite simple, but on the receiving end it's quite difficult.

So what the GP was saying, I think, is that by creating a large installed base of users who can only read Excel-97, it might give Microsoft some impetus to not change the default format every time the mood hits them.

Main Market

[sirrobert]

I understand what you mean, but this is precisely what is laudable about this service. I just finished a degree that took me 10 years -- during which I lived as a poor college bum. I am very much in favor of a service like this that students can use for free, legally from any computer lab, for any physics/chemistry/etc. experiments. I personally don't care if my homework is moderately secure or heavily secure. I know lots of students who don't use spreadsheets when they could and should, preferring a word processor to arrange data they calculated manually.

The point? It is one thing to create a product designed to fill the need of the main market. It's another thing to be just a little off-center such that you are a force causing the expansion of the market. If more college students start using this for their data, then the user-base of the "spreadsheet technology" increases. I don't care about this from a business standpoint, particularly, but I do care that more people will be using tools more appropriate to their tasks, and everything will improve by a degree each time that happens.

Students aren't the only group who ought to be using spreadsheets but aren't, either. Little League scheduling, minor family finance ("Which grocery store is more economical? Let's record our receipts for a month from each and find out"), and many, many others.

Support for CSV and XLS only?

[jZnat]

With the not-so-recent ISO/IEC standardisation of OpenDocument Format, where's the support for .ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) files? Or support for .xlsx (OpenXML Spreadsheet) even? If you can include support for a binary and proprietary format such as Excel's, why not include support for the standard (OpenDocument) or even the bloated may-become-a-useful-standard (OpenXML)? They're both based on XML (which I'm sure the developers at Google are quite efficient with), and they both use simple and established compression formats (ODF uses a .zip file compatible with PKZIP and Java's jar, don't know what OpenXML uses). Even MS Excel supports several different spreadsheet formats; what kind of spreadsheet application can succeed without at least half-way decent support for legacy formats?

Of course, CSV is much simpler than any XML format, but for that exact same reason, you can only store static data in a CSV (unless your static data happens to be formulae that can be executed by your spreadsheet program).

Re:AJAX is the key

[Anonymous Coward]

Having two monopolies (one heavy native and one light web based) isn't much better than having one.

Actually, having two monopolies is impossible. You see that first part of the word "monopoly"? It's the prefix "mono" which means "one." If you have two of them, neither one is a monopoly, by definition.

Less pedantically, but equally obviously, it's also true that having two companies is tremendously better than having one. You might want to look up the word "competition," which is present when you have two companies but absent when you have one.

Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS?

[jrp2]

"No business is going to trust google to store it documents and spreadsheets."

No argument. But for those folks, don't forget they can always package it up and put it into a "server appliance" that is under the control of the business; on their Intranet.

I have one of their "Google Mini" appliances. It is a $2000 (and up) server that crawls our Intranet and provides local (and secure) search functions of our Bugzilla, internal wiki, mailman archives, etc. It took me about an hour to unpack it, RTFM, rack it and get it booted up. Another hour to get to the point it was serving search data. It has gotten rave reviews from our users, and I think I have spent less than 1-man day total setting it up and maintaining it (mostly customizing the interface, etc.).

http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/ [google.com]

I think it is highly likely they will extend this model to deal with this issue. Not sure what they would charge, but it would not be hard to price it in a way that makes them a lot of money, and makes it very easy for my company to justify buying it. I am hoping the next step (probably before all the Office apps) is to get Gmail available in a server like this.

Re:AJAX is the key

[mrchaotica]

Gee, nothing like completely ignoring what he said! Go back and read the "as long as you can rule out collusion" part, because collusion is exactly what the RIAA does.

Re:The Real Strategy

[gmuslera]

For me the "real" strategy goes a bit more in this line: Google specializes in searching, and is pretty much the top there (at least combining criterias). But the problem is that not all info is in internet, nor not all info in internet have meaning. If people move the info to internet (because there they have it more integrated, shareable at the point they choose, maybe more consolidated, etc) and give more meanings to it, the better will be, both for google and for the user.

Think in the conceptual change that was mixing chat with mail, searching in both as it were just one, and extend that concept to all your info, and add to the mix the rest of internet info.

Lots of the new services of google seems to go around this idea, both acquiring more data, and giving more meaning to the data. And personal data is, for the owner, data that could worth to be searched as all the other.

Re:This is not invading MS territory.

[14CharUsername]

I think you're on to something there. They already have the Google search appliance, so why not a google office appliance?

MS doesn't have any good solution for collaborating on stuff so most people rely on email attachments and shared network drives. Both of which are kind of crappy. Wouldn't it be nice to have an easy way to have the team work together, with a nice version control system? If they do this right, Google could make a fortune off this.

Re:Main Market

[sirrobert]

My point is specifically that there is some data that doesn't need to be secured. Who cares if someone breaks in and steals access to my science homework? It's not that valuable. When I'm doing genuine original research, then I'll pay enough money to secure it on a local machine. But when I'm doing the lab experiment on page 194 of the standard workbook for this semester's textbook, who cares? In the worst case scenario, a cheater breaks in and uses my data for his grade. To protect against that, having a password-protected account on a server is sufficient to protect me from charges of dishonesty.

So what, then? Is it the little league schedule that you want to generate then print and distribute on paper? Uh-oh! Someone might find out when the Fighting Pandas are playing the Twirling Tweeties -- before the release date!

Which grocery store is less expensive? CRAP! Now my $75/month advantage over my neighbors is shot! Dang, and I was hoping to be the lucky winner of natural selection on this one, and pass on my genes more frequently based on my superior shopping abilities.

How in the world does "homework and little league schedules" get interpreted "business documents and credit card (personal) info?" Question -- is there any data that doesn't need to be secured? Should I secure my name? I guess I should encrypt my business card, so that I can distribute it freely, but only people with the secret decoder ring can figure out what it says. Also, I should protect my business's phone number and web URL. It would be TERRIBLE if someone found out what those were without my explicit invitation.

Re:AJAX is the key

[Eil]

Google is an evil company whose primary objective is to use everyone elses content to generate revenue

Well if that's your criterion for evil may I suggest you stay far away from Slashdot, Yahoo, digg, reddit, flickr, delicious, craigslist, ebay, online bookstores, all usenet providers, news sites, weather sites, forum websites, every commercial search engine in existance, and let's not forget ISPs themselves.

In fact, to keep a safe distance from all this evil, it's probably just safer if you never go online again. None of us would complain.

Re:The Web Browser Is the UI for Google's WebOS

[VoidEngineer]

Throw your OS away. The only application you need is a dedicated browser (Google will provide one soon) and an internet connection to Google. No hard drives are necessary.

And how, exactly, are you proposing that browser is going to run? And how is it going to handle hardware and device drivers? The processor, the bus, the network drivers, the network card, the video drivers, the video card. Is that browser going to be multithreaded? Are you going to be able to run more than one browser at a time? What about screensavers and the network stack?

I think you're mistaking operating system with hard drives. Not the same thing. Even with diskless computers, you still need an operating system (typically loaded from some type of flash ram) to handle the processor, the bus, the memory, and the interfaces.

Re:Who in their right mind would use this?

[Eil]

Why would anyone store their documents on any outside corporation's server, much less one with a demonstrated committment and ability to mine those documents?

If you're so worried about Google mining or selling your private information, here's a simple, easy, and 100% effective solution: don't put your private information online. Geez, it's not that hard of a concept to grasp.

From what I can tell, they're pushing the online spreadsheets as a way to deliberately share them with other people. Nowhere (that I could tell) were they suggesting that you upload your bank ledger to them.

Re:AJAX is the key

[theStorminMormon]

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure I buy it. The problem isn't with Google, it's not even (in this example) with the PATRIOT act. You're saying that if a corrupt senator abuses an arguably unconstitutional law THEN, under THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES my privacy is violated. Talk about multiple system-wide failures. That's like saying a spoon isn't safe if some angry man tries to make you eat it.

This whole example is only marginally easier than a corrupt senator skipping google entirely (I think from recent proposed bills we can all agree senators know squat about tech) and just using the PATRIOT act to send some goons to my house to rough me up and search my house for bomb-building materials. Which, if he's really angry, they could bring in the car to plant as evidence. Personally, I'd RATHER the senator go after my GMAIL account then do a warrantless search of my home. I have good ideas and conversations on my GMAIL account; I have a wife and baby at home.

There is a potential for abuse becuase knowledge (information) is powerful and Google is collecting a lot of new information. The question is: is the benefit of this new information (which includes free email, better browsing, possibly universal access to scholarly info, etc.) worth the additional risk? I think the risk is only marginally worse than what we already have, but the potential payoffs include at least partially realizing the internet as the haven for knowledge and innovation that it was always touted to be.

I'm OK with that trade-off.

-stormin

Re:Bad Example

[jsebrech]

Spoken like someone who's never had an identity theft problem. You probably don't know anyone either, who's ever had their identity stolen.

Kindly explain how the risk for identity theft is increased by you keeping your details on google's servers? There have been several worms which sent personal data to the worm's originator, so your local PC is NOT a safer place for your data (especially given the fact that google has not had a single data theft incident that has been reported).

Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS?

[Azghoul]

It's off by 20 meters and you're fucking complaining?

Don't know much about the realities of digital mapping, do you?

Re:Next Up: A Google WebOS?

[drinkypoo]

Don't know much about the realities of digital mapping, do you?

IANAMA (Mapping Expert) but the GP comment claims that it is a correctable problem that was caused by proceeding without forethought. You have not refuted this in your comment, thus I am inclined to believe that it is true. If it is a solvable problem through known means, then google has no excuse for not getting it right.

20 Meters is 60 feet. In some places it could quite conceivably put you on the wrong street. I'd be annoyed too.

Re:as the MIT $100 laptop

[itsthebin]

But I guess pointing that out just makes me a racist.

No , your elitist attitude makes you racist.
where I live in asia , the majority of people have mobile phones and minimal landlines. It can tke years to get a landline in many parts of the country. But GPRS is available everywhere you can recieve a mobile signal , and EDGE and WCDMA are available in areas . The prices for these services are cheaper than voice calls.
Just because you need a super fast computer and a high bandwitdh connection to achieve anything does not mean it is required by everyone - functionality can be achieved without the pretty colours.
I take it your final line was your signature