Quick update from the world of IT. Putting all the pieces together, it’s pretty clear that Goolge is gathering its forces for an assault on Microsoft’s heartland: the Office suite of business applications.
See for yourself:
- Excel. Google Spreadsheets has just been announced although it isn’t accessible yet (to me, at least).
- Word. They bought Writely, an online word processor, and then took the service offline. Presumably it will reappear in due course under the Google banner.
- Access. Google Base s a kind of database, although not a sophisticated high-end thing like Access, more of a tilt at Craigslist and eBay. However, if they implemented some kind of access control it could be a very useful, multiuser database.
- Outlook. Combine Google Mail and Calendar and you’ve got a lot of the functionality of Outlook and some of the multiuser functionality of Exchange.
I can’t find anything that competes with PowerPoint but an easy to use, Google-style website editor and hosting service gets a long way there. All you’d need to add was some pretty templates.
With Office 2007 coming and Microsoft pushing down the opposite route, from desktop apps to hosted applications (CRM 3.0 and Outlook Web Access, for example) and trying to turn MSN into a Google lookalike, we’re in for an interesting year.
Full disclosure: Microsoft are a major client of Articulate, my writing business. Google aren’t but they did buy lunch once.
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I’m not sure I completely agree, in the short-term at least. I don’t think google’s short-term goal is to take over a portion of Microsoft’s market share for office tools. In the long term, that might be another story…
Have a look at Nicholas Carr’s blog and see if you agree. http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/06/googles_office.php
Well it is open to interpretation since we’re doing more Kremlin watching than anything else, aren’t we?
I saw a nice contradictory opinion on SVN (http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/google_flares.php) which basically asserts that these kinds of announcements are ‘flares’ designed to throw Microsoft of the scent.
I think Nicholas Carr’s interesting blog makes a good point too. I agree that Google aren’t trying to resurrect Lotus 1-2-3 or some other standalone Excel-killer. It’s more that they’re chopping Excel’s legs off at the ankles.