Google ushers in age of online spreadsheets this week

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 06 June 2006 08:16

Your IT - Home IT

Ever since Google acquired the rudimentary online product Writely in March, the world has been waiting for the search leader to bring out a usable online word processor. True to form, however, Google has surprised all and sundry with the news that this week it will launch an online spreadsheet product.

Market watchers are quick to pit the online efforts of Google against the established market leading Microsoft Office products, whenever the search leader releases so much as a sneeze of an application. Google Calendar looks to be a handy tool and may well be a success but is it going to get people off Outlook? Perhaps. But a spreadsheet is something else and Google itself is quick to play down the comparisons and not surprisingly so.

The release of a test version of an online spreadsheet is hardly going to cause Microsoft to break into a cold sweat. Open Office.org has had the latest version of its free Excel look-alike on the market since 2005 and it hasn't caused so much as a ripple in Microsoft's market share. Spreadsheets often contain complex propietary corporate information, involving complicated calculations and macros. A company with years of these things sitting on their servers cannot simply throw all that out because it wants to move to a new product - not even the mostly (but not 100%) compatible Open Office, let alone some new online upstart.

Google itself recognises that has a long way to go before it even begins to scratch the surface of the Microsoft Excel market. The company's official line is that its new product is mainly for for users who want to share and allow others to edit information over the web. So who will be the users? One cannot imagine corporate users doing financial modelling and reports and sharing this information in an online scenario with the data sitting on Google servers rather than corporate servers. Small businesses? More likely they would spend a few hundred for a copy of Microsoft Office or download Open Office if even a few hundred was too much spend.

This brings us to another very interesting sticking point with the provision of web services that simulate desktop applications - bandwidth and storage. In time, both problems will be sold - or will they? If the end game is centralised storage (or distributed centralised storage), of things such as spreadsheet, wordprocessing. database and massive presentation files, then the keepers of that repository will not only have to provide monumental storage, data serving and access capacity, but they will wield power and responsibility almost beyond imagination.

Another scenario is that local storage is maintained and just the application is served as required, which would be far more palatable to many corporate users. Assuming this is the model (although both Google and Microsoft want to get into the storage business), coming up with office productivity tools like wordprocessors and spreadsheets are not trivial tasks. Microsoft has been at it for more than 20 years. Having seen some of the early attempts at online word processors recently, there appears to be some way to go before they come close to emulating the power and functionality of the established proprietary of open source products.

If Google runs true to form again, we can expect that use of its new spreadsheet will be by invitation only in the first instance. The company will want to iron initial bugs before going to a wider beta release and there may need to be a few of those. It is doubtful whether we should be holding our collective breath for a production version of Google Calc (or whatever it's going to be called) anyttime soon. Then again, Google has surprised us before and will no doubt do so again many times over.