Google Spreadsheet fuss beyond belief

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 07 June 2006 19:00

Opinion and Analysis

Just for the fun of it, let's suppose that this new Google product does somehow gain the functionality and performance to start matching it with Excel. Will that mean that Microsoft will lose many of its customers overnight? Not at all. Open Office.org has a free spreadsheet that is largely compatible with Excel and arguably almost as good. The same can be said for its word processor. Yet people still stick with their Microsoft Office products. They're just that little bit better and, for most users, that one per cent or two of incompatibility is not worth the hassle for a few hundred bucks, especially if you're a business that has years of intellectual capital tied up in your office documents.

Even Google itself says that it's not trying to compete with Excel. The implication is that Google Spreadsheet is for the casual user. But how many users do you know who have ever used a spreadsheet casually? For that matter, what exactly is the purpose of having an online wordprocessor? Local storage is so cheap and small, why would we even bother trying to do online what we can do locally?

This is not to say by any stretch that Google's online applications, besides its fantastic search engine, are no good. Many of them are great. Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google News, the new Google Calendar, even Google Talk are all good and potentially great applications that are more suited to the online space than the desktop. But putting office productivity tools online, for the moment at least, is like trying to launch an aeroplane into outer space.