Google Releasing an Office Suite 198
prostoalex writes "Google Apps for Your Domain is Google's entrance into the office productivity world, but contrary to popular expectations, the company is not shipping word processor or spreadsheet for corporate use just yet. Google, Inc. bundled e-mail client (Gmail), shared calendaring environment (Google Calendar), instant messaging client (GTalk) and HTML page generator (Google Page Creator) to be used across specific domains. The service will be ad-supported, reports the Associated Press." From that article: "The free edition of Apps for Your Domain is, like Google's main site, supported with ads. By the end of the year, the company also plans to launch a paid version that will offer more storage, some degree of support, and likely, no ads. A price for this edition hasn't been set. Providing e-mail and other applications for businesses moves Google closer into what has traditionally been turf occupied by Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, Google released a program that builds simple Excel-type spreadsheets but lets users access them on the Web."
demand? (Score:5, Insightful)
* Loss of control of corporate data
* Loss of control of corporate image
* Insufficient ASP security to counter risks
* Exposure of corporate data to other ASP customers
* Compromise of corporate data
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't need to be. Most people use far less than 10% of the functionality. I've seen people using Excel on daily basis, but don't know how to even use formulas.
There is so many users out there that doesn't need functionality, only ease of use. They would love a spreadsheet that only has the very few features they actually use.
Personally I find Excel a bit limited in functionality. I use a lot of formulas, but I probably still don't use even 2% of the functionality. But the ones I need is often missing. I don't care about the 98% I don't use, I care about the 5 I need that is not there. Have those, and the 2% I use, in an easily accessible web-application, I'll probably use it daily, with ads and all.
Google Releasing an Office Suite ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to compete with
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Insightful)
Define serious. 90% of businesses are tiny. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people aren't interested in computers (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like me and my car, couldn't care less as long as it gets me from A to B. If public transport could get me pretty much from A to B as well as the car I'd happily ditch it. Same's true of computers, if they can get rid of all the IT bollocks, they will, happily.
Re:Most people aren't interested in computers (Score:3, Insightful)
Google's server could go down, the company's internet access could go down, someone could attempt to brute-force their way into the account, and so on...
Users (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
When is an office suite not an office suite (Score:4, Insightful)
- No word processor. Check.
- No spreadsheet. Check.
- No presentation tool. Check.
Seriously - how is this "Google Releasing an office suite"?Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a slightly complex word document from a client. (bulleted lists, block indents, embedded objects)
View it in word, view it in writer.
Both are readable, but they do not look exactly the same.
Margins are off, wrap doesn't line up, linespacing is slightly off.
You can fiddle with the document to make it look the same, but it needs to be identical by default.
It's pretty darned important for people to see the page as it was intended.
And no PDF isn't really an option of you want to edit the content and use it elsewhere.
Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Most people aren't interested in computers (Score:4, Insightful)
The local hard disk could crash, they could get a virus, be attacked by script kiddies, a local switch could fail, the laptop could be dropped etc. Remote systems are no more risk than local ones. With remote systems you usually have competent admins, mirrored storage, secure connections, highly available networks etc. The risks are just a little different.
Re: Google Releasing an Office Suite ?? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is all about Exchange, and nothing at all about Office. But Google has been rumored to be preparing to launch an office suite, so this title is sure to turn more heads.
I guess I shouldn't expect so much, that people would actually read the article and decide for themselves if it is related or not.
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the collaboration (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly I don't think Google is aiming to replace Excel, per se. MS has too long a head start, and frankly they'd just be putting themselves in the position of playing catch-up, forever. (Kinda like WINE; people that want to find some reason not to like it, are always going to find one.)
Rather than just looking at G-Spreadsheet as "Excel...but free!" it seems better to look at what it can offer that Excel can't. Particularly since being 'free' isn't that compelling a feature, given that most companies see Microsoft Office as a sunk cost -- just part of the overhead of owning a computer. The killer feature of Google Spreadsheet is sharing.
A little ways up in the thread somebody was discussing a problem (that is very common) where you might send a bunch of people a very simple spreadsheet, in his example it was a class grading sheet. Each of them work on it and send it back to you. When you get it back, you have a mess -- how do you combine the changes back into one document? There's really not any good way to do it. The best thing you can do is to have a rigid document-management workflow, where only one person at a time can have the "working copy" of a document, and then they pass it around. (Storing it on a fileserver basically does this, but necessitates a fileserver and also brings in additional problems.)
There's definitely a market for something that allows for a lot more collaboration than the MS Office suite either allows or is designed for. Google, if they're smart (and I have every reason to think that they are) is probably looking to do more than just "reinvent the wheel...online." Or at least, if they're going to reinvent the wheel, they know that their wheel has to have some compelling features that will make people switch. In this case, I don't think that the feature is going to be the fact that it's free, it's going to be the ability to share and collaborate without worrying about CMSes, file sharing, Citrix, or any of the other hacks which people basically use in order to make single-user desktop apps more collaborative.
In the same way that someone once joked that IRC is "multiplayer Notepad," G-Cal might begin as "multiplayer Excel," but end up looking like something totally different from what it would be like, without the interactive/collaborative ability.
Why Google SpreadSheets Will Become Popular... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, it would need a *few* more features.
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Insightful)
Excel. I *was* impressed. I have seen a lot, but this was genuinely special.
Seems as if for a secretary with Excel, everything looks like a table.
Re:demand - Google Apps for Education (Score:4, Insightful)
At the end of the FAQ page [google.com] there's a section with information for people using Google Apps for Education. High schools (and perhaps even colleges) would benefit from being able to offload these sorts of IT needs onto Google, therefore allowing their meager IT staffing to focus on education-specific IT infrastructure requirements.
Also, the SOHO and non-profit fields would really benefit as well. The more of these basic things we offload, the more we can focus our energies on our actual fields. If we were starting our non-profit from scratch, I would definitely be encouraging us to use this. Even still, once they release the ad-free version, I'm going to be comparing it to what we're currently paying for our webhosting. If it's the same or cheaper, then I'm going to be proposing a switch. Gmail is much better than our current email offering, and a shared calendar service would make many lives easier.
This is all well and good, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it work on the airplane? The train? The bus?
These new Internet applications are great as a demo of what can be done, but they're not really useful in the larger scheme of things, ESPECIALLY in corporate or business environments.
In many of the corporations I've been in, getting outbound port 80 access from various departments is restricted (for good reason), as are IM ports and other things. You don't want to be putting company financials out on some website's spreadsheet, do you?
What routers are you going through?
Who else can see that information?
Is there a caching proxy upstream that you don't know about?
What happens when the network goes down?
Too risky, and it only works where there's an Internet connection, which (contrary to public belief) is not ubiquitous these days.
Re:Most people aren't interested in computers (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, but....... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Most people aren't interested in computers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the Windows clipboard has a load of neat features that are almost never used, including network-awareness.
Hyped again (Score:3, Insightful)
After all of this talk of an office suite, columns and opinions about whether or not Google is going to ship an office suite, they are calling this an office suite?
Someone tell me how a web email client, a calendar, an instant messager and a HTML application is a full office suite? Then allow me to beat you over the head with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Powerpoint. OpenOffice is an Office suite, this is media hype. But we can't plug OpenOffice in the general media though, because general knowledge that home users are paying hundreds of dollars for something they could just as easily get for free might slow down commerce.