That’s certainly a reasonable way of looking at it, but I’m not sure it is the volume play. That is, Google may find a business in providing such backend services for hundreds or thousands of users but they are likely looking to have millions of users whose requirements are somewhat simpler. In that regard, if they capture the mindshare of people who have only occasional need for a spreadsheet, it will be one less reason to use a desktop-based office suite, be it proprietary or open source. It helps to make Google into the default environment where you live and do your work, though I don’t see the existence of the spreadsheet per se as translating into immediate ad revenue, for example.

Bob

Interesting comments. I actually think a bit differently. In fact, being an ex-IBMer, I would imagine that you would have caught on that maybe Google is not infact reinventing the wheel, but that they are just adding turbo chargers to it. I work in the financial services space and the big brou haha has been “GRID”…I beleive that Spreadsheets is the front end to the largest grid compute environment on earth. One can’t refute the fact that EXCEL is the de facto front end on Wall Street but the problem is that it’s nearly impossible to scale a grid solution, manage data and provide resource reliability without some sophisticated resource scheduling solution that can manage memory and CPU cycles simultaneously. I don’t think Data Synapse or Platform computing get it. I do believe, that Google does. It may just be that Google’s Spreadsheet is the front end to the largest grid computing environment known to man. Check out my blog (axwack.wordpress.com) and check out the data center (by doing a Google search of Oregon) of the data center they are buidling…BTW, I interviewed with the PM for Spreadsheets. He’s the ex-CEO for a company called 2Web Technologies but the company is still in existence, apparently, calling themselves, XL2WEB. Look at the problems they are solving, it’s for complex compute problems requring distributed compute nodes to marshal and partition work. Classic Grid problem! The only thing is that you need complex OLAP and deriviatives libraries to bring it to the next level…

What do you think?

Seriously, someone should take the reviewers up on it. Make a list of ten-year-old Office suites, and then compare them to each other and to the various modern MS Office competitors that are receiving this sort of comparison, and then compare them to MS Office in its current saleable versions.

It might amuse quite a lot of people.

As far as I’m concerned, the fact that all my photos are stored on an online server administered by one of the leading portal companies which I know has regular backups puts me at ease. I know my photos are safe. Much more so than if they simply sat on my personal disk, no matter whether I do nightly backups. For one thing I may lose both my disk and the backup at the same time if my house burned down one night. I know that won’t happen with the server copy.

I also wonder how much longer we will actually need to worry about offline functionality. Seriously. This problem is bound to disappear eventually. There is no question that eventually we will be in an always connected world. Just think about how often you have to worry about being in a place where there is no phone at all. Or even more and more how many times you have to worry about your cell phone being out of reach. Granted we aren’t quite there yet. But when it comes to thinking longterm, the way forward is pretty clear on that front.

Everything that matters—data, services, communication, entertainment, etc.—will either develop a mobile version or eventually fade from core relevance in people’s lives. Web-based apps will by necessity be key for delivery. We already see a growing generation of people who don’t care where their photos, contact info, , messages, appointments, music are stored; they care about being able to access them anywhere.

Mail,calendaring, to-do, custom apps via rich-client or web, ODF editors coming (thanks), Sametime awareness, DB2 support, etc, etc. – it’s already here for those who leverage it. At roughly $140 per user for the Express pricing (also includes deployment of multiple Domino servers), it’s without a doubt one of the most business savy investments for an SMB that can be made. When you start adding it up I would guess the other guys are at least an *order of magnitude* more expensive – just on licensing costs alone. Not to mention much higher upgrade, deployment, hardware costs compared to Notes.

In regards to open-source, none of them have the tight integration and at the same time the diversity and breadth of Notes. You can “cobble” together a bunch of different tools/apps but then you have consistency, upgrade, information sharing/storage issues. Not to mention different security models and keeping updated versions from different tools in synch. For only ~$140 per user for Notes, why bother with the headache/uncertainty – at least given the current state of open-source in the collaboration space. And even then.

Keep opening Notes up so that more and more people are aware of it’s capability and ROI. As I said the Eclipse work is very exciting in both those regards.

Btw keep up the good work on ODF because your right in so many ways. I use iTunes – but every thing is still stored as MP3 format – so I can switch in the future for whatever reason makes sense to *me*, not Steve Jobs or anybody else. Same logic applies to ODF vs MS office format lock-in. Including the productivity editors in Notes is brilliant.