Tonic to provide Google Docs & Spreadsheets & Presentations!

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 18 April 2007 06:57

Your IT - Home IT

Google may have to give some serious consideration to renaming its online office suite of applications. With CEO Eric Schmidt's announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo that Google plans to add an online presentation application to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the web search leader will soon have a complete office productivity suite thanks to a company based in Australia and the US.

According to the Official Google Blog, the new presentation application will be based on technology from a company in Melbourne, Australia, and San Francisco called Tonic Systems, which Google has acquired and says has great technology for presentation creation and document conversion.

As Google says: "We've already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you're almost always going to share them. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats."

CEO Eric Schmidt keeps doing his bit to downplay the competitive aspect with Microsoft of having an online office suite. He makes no exception with its new presentation product as a competitor to PowerPoint.

However, whatever Schmidt utters in this regard appears to be totally at odds with phrases like "it's a better fit to how people use the web" and the sentiments expressed in the Google blog.The new application has been closed for new beta testers and is expected to be available in the second half of 2007.