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."
Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Interesting)
Also it's pretty slow, so that's a big downside as well.
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.
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Funny)
Yep. If a middle management type is clop-clop-clopping through the marble-floored reception area with her steel-rimmed glasses and her Vallejo broach towards the conference room where the hairpieces will sit around and guffaw over cracked lobster while they decide how to divide the salaries of all the people they're about to fire, she better have some CHARTS AND GRAPHS with her or her presentation won't be entertaining enough.
Because as we all know, as long as the presentation is entertaining, it doesn't matter if it's completely wrong. How else could she afford 17-inch wheels for her S-I'm better than U-V with enough chrome to turn Mount Vesuvius into the world's greatest IMAX theater? Priorities, man. Priorities.
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Most of the managers I worked for who claimed to be female had faces that could stop a clock. Nice try though. Leave the schtick to the pros there, Sparky.
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
B-------d bingo [Re:Google Spreadsheet] (Score:2)
Why care? They are likely to play BULLS**T Bingo [wikipedia.org] in meeting most of the time...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Aw, make that image go away from my mind. *shudder*
Just want to mention that I regularly get sent pictures for use in ads and brochures... in Word. They call them "Word images", accordingly. "Hey, I just sent you a Word image of the diagram you asked for."
Thanks Bill. Thanks indeed.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
In my office the official procedure we are supposed to follow for screen prints is to use the "Print Scrn" button to copy the screen image to the clipboard and then paste it to a Word document.
In. Order. To. Print. It.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the Windows clipboard has a load of neat features that are almost never used, including network-awareness.
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, there is a lot to be said for keeping graphic development like charts local, rather than shared among a group. The workflow I envision is using Google Spreadsheets for data collection and shared reference resources where its collaborative nature really shines. Then develop summary reports and graphics by downloading and importing into Excel or OpenOffice and having at it.
I shudder to think of what business graphics produced by a committee would look like, or how long it would take to decide what col
Re: (Score:2)
Adding functionality wil be easy ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since its all client-side javascript, I can see them addressing both bloat and functionality by having users custom configure what functions they need the spreadhseet to have, and having only those javascript libraries loaded by default.
This would also open it up to 3rd-party developers, who could submit their scripts as add-ins.
Want your spreadsheet to automatically text message you when a certain field hits a critical value? Want your spreadsheet to email a diff when Joe Luser saves it? Wnat yur spreadsheet to look up stuff in an external database based on a crc64 of the values in other fields? No problemo.
Re:Adding functionality wil be easy ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ui/overvi
It's essentially very toolbar oriented, but organizes them based on the task they are associated with (page layout, document reviewing, etc.).
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, but....... (Score:4, Insightful)
Never mind the formulas.... (Score:2)
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.
Most people are using Excel to present text in tables--totally ignorant of the fact that their word processor would probably be better at doing that job.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I knew I'd get that. ;-)
It's a rule of thumb that 80% of the users only uses 20% of the functions. I think that for Excel it's much more extreme, because so many people uses it, and there really isn't very many powerusers out there.
I wasn't talking about the place I work, I really don't think that company matters much to the world market of spreadsheets. ;-)
If cours
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Interesting)
Define serious. 90% of businesses are tiny. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (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...
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Define serious. 90% of businesses are tiny. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to use exclusively OpenOffice and I think it is great, but there is one thing that stands in the way of it being wildly used: design. For all it's greatness, it doesn't look very good at all, infact, it's kinda ugly. Meanwhile, I just downloaded Office 2007 which looks, and feels, amazing. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they sure as hell nailed it with Office 2007. Not only does it look great, but their revamp of the toolbar system (the ribbon) is fantastic. Very slick. Right now, I do everything with it.
OpenOffice needs like 10 professional designers to really hunker down and figure out a way to make it look better. That's easily the number one complaint I hear from people when I try to convince them of using OpenOffice.
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.
Re:Google Spreadsheet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Winword doesn't have that feature.
A lot of things need to happen so you can reopen a document in another machine, and see the same that the guy who produced it.
At least, you need the same version, the same platform, and the fonts the guy used. But if you have that, openoffice is just as good, the same documents looks the same if you open it with the same version of the same program.
I stopped using winword at office2000 (I have winword2002 right now at work, but I just don't use it,
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft properly asserts that OpenOffice is not 100% compatible with their product. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice documents
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, I can't really be mad at OO and the K people, because everything has this problem (or I could just be mad at everyone?). Even PDFs look different between Adobe, KPDF, and Foxit. *sigh*
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
them:"My Word is broken!"
me:"How's that?"
them:"it's only printing two pages"
me:"how many should it have printed?"
them:"four."
me:"What's the last thing ir printed out?"
them: BLAH BLAH BLAH
me: "well that's the last thing on the document, is it in reading layout?"
them: "no
It displayed on four pages so they want to see it print on 4 pages. Sad really.
Re: (Score:2)
Design: it's not only about what's inside the application.
One of the basic problems I have with OpenOffice: it's called "Office." One of the basic problems with "Google Apps for Your Domain," well in the vein of bad naming, is a comment even necessary? So bad is Google's product design at the identity level -- you know, where you create a great name and logo and make sense of yourself to your target markets -- so bad is Google at this that we are all knee-jerking with "Google Releasing an Office Suite."
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, you have a point there...
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, yeah, the geek "Who cares about design?" defence. The fact is, design matters, it matters alot. Design makes you more productive, it makes you understand how the program works, it makes the program appealing. Have you actually used Office 2007? If you have windows, try it, I'm telling you it's really cool. It makes all the features obvious, it makes it clear what results each option does. And you can't complain about the function of MS Word, it can do pretty much everything that you ever need to do. The
Re: (Score:2)
Put $85 million dollars behind the development of OpenOffice.org, and then we can think about comparing the two.
How much have you donated to improve the free office suite you're crucifying here?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, maybe that's the point.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's hard.
They keep telling that the next version will be great.
I stopped believing when I switched from msoffice97 to msoffice2000 and its magically dissapearing menu options, remember that?
Now I use openoffice, and in the places where it's different from msoffice, it makes a lot more sense.
Now I'm using msoffice at work, I am kind of forced to use msoutlook2003, and I can't make sense of this. Funcions are really hard to find, for example, search is awful (google desktop makes it somewhat better) and
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How is this relevant in any way? My point was this, when selecting an office suite for corporate or personal use, which one is superior, MS Office or OpenOffice? Right now the answer is easily MS Office.
And if you're going to rag on MS Office GUI, lets not forget that much of the OpenOffices design is clearly inspired by the MS products. They have always made the best office products.
I'm all for MS bashing, but when it comes to Office suites, they do a very good job. A very good job indeed.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Google's doesn't offer much in the way of data analysis
As a user of Writely and Google's Spreadsheets.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps next time I'll use Preview.
It's not for corporate users (Score:2)
This is inevitable btw, as the cost of bandwidth drops and support costs remain relatively constant.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
In my observation, demand for applications like this is high with executives (who like shiny toys but never do any actual work with them), while the peons who would actually be using the system all go 'meh' and carry on using telephones for all their intra-office communication needs. Shared calendars are managed by secretaries via the simple method of talking to each other.
Sure, there's always a few places where stuff like this gets used, and in any
Re:demand? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google is a corporation. Google probably knows, or at least very much should know, what a corporation needs in terms of security in an office package, particularly in light of the behaviour of its competitors. Assuming Google wishes to go down this road they would need to be prepared to offer secure solutions to potential corporate clients. I would be astounded if they haven't already thought of that.
Sheesh, they are pretty smart guys, they aren't jumping in head first with a half-finished product. The volume of beta products shows they are prudent, and apparently concerned with delivering quality. If they want the corporate world there's a good chance they can eventually take it.
Writely is good. It is already capable of completing the vast majority of real everyday WP tasks. It is fast and simple - far faster and simpler and more appropriate than Word for most things. Word already has far too much stuff crammed into it, and the new version seemingly even more deadwood than the current.
It may be marginal, but a corporation could save money and increase productivity by switching to this product once it is fully ready. The only issues would be ones that you raised - which are solvable...
I'm sure the demand is there.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Google Releasing an Office Suite ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to compete with
What they're competing with... (Score:2)
I use both
My main concern... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Users (Score:3, Insightful)
No spreadsheet or word processor: not office suite (Score:5, Informative)
When is an office suite not an office suite (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
SOHO and private firms (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Further, when I shred a document - I know it
Re: (Score:2)
Google Calendar (Score:4, Interesting)
Google has a good start on a superior replacement for Outlook.
For the rest of the office suite, there's OpenOffice.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
When I can search thousands of GMail messages instantly, and then it takes Outlook a minute or two to search fucking TEXT on my LOCAL HARD DISK, you know there's a problem.
Why Google SpreadSheets Will Become Popular... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, it would need a *few* more features.
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
If I were planning an office tools entry (Score:3, Interesting)
Powerpoint is the weak link in the chain of MS Office hegemony. It does the least of the MS Office suite to justify its proprietary format. Building a web standards (or defacto subset of standards) based application means immediately every desktop computer has a compatible player.
Next GWT provides a toolkit for creating "active content" that runs in our presentations, a nice "aftermarket" for small software developers. Add a halfway composer/ide with webdav support and it could become, for many, a replacement for FrontPage as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Google is doing it the right way. (Score:2)
Other contenders (Score:2)
Spreadsheets are shee-it (Score:2)
Not so usable... (Score:2)
hand in hand with Firefox enhancements (Score:2)
Shared Hosting killer service? (Score:2, Interesting)
- Gmail
- Google Calendar
- Google Chat
- Google Web Page Creator
It sounds to me more like a competitive shared hosting solution for small business, rather than an office suite.
(More info: http://www.h3rald.com/articles/view/google-apps-f
privacy concerns (Score:3, Interesting)
assuming they put up the increased functionality of a word processor and spreadsheet (even presentation,) then they will practically be able to read the documents of everyone. it's like giving your ideas, corporate secrets, intentions, plans, etc to google for them to see. even if they are for "ad purposes", it is still scary. basically, they already know me inside out from the searches i make (even though i disable cookies by default, my isp gives me an almost static ip add.)
no thanks. i'll keep private data with me. i've got open office just in case the free argument goes into place. i'm beginning to appreciate microsoft now as google is able to collect much more information from me than them.
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.
Re: (Score:2)