Google Office

6 June 2006

This is the beginning of the end for Microsoft. While the purchase of Writely was a bit of a give-away, Google creating a spreadsheet app is the surest sign we’re going to get that they’re going straight after Microsoft’s core business.

Now, don’t get me wrong – Google isn’t there yet. This new spreadsheet app certainly isn’t going to offer most of the features that Excel offers – indeed, it probably doesn’t offer features that most people use on a daily basis. In the same way, Writely certainly doesn’t offer enough features at this stage to challenge Word.

But they don’t need to.

What Google’s web-based office offerings can offer is all sorts of features that, without Microsoft releasing their own web-based office release, Office will never be able to offer. Features like being able to access your documents wherever you are, seamless collaboration features and much more.

Office has beaten away it’s competitors for so long by having so many features that no-one has the resources to develop a serious competitor (that and file-format lock in).

This is all going to get very interesting.

From: Articles

6 June 2006