Like many people, I heard yesterday of Google’s plan to announce an online spreadsheet today. I was busy near Boston this morning and then traveling home this afternoon, so I’ve only now been able to catch up with some of the second wave of press and opinion.
The first thing I saw was Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ piece in eWeek called “Another Google App, Another Google Yawn“. Uh oh. This didn’t look promising. I generally agree with a lot of what SVN says but when he said
Web-based applications have not replaced, and will not ever replace, desktop-based applications. I have heard until I’m sick of it about how centralized, network-based applications are the wave of the future. I heard back in the mid-80s, and here in the mid-00s, I’m hearing it again.
It doesn’t work because the Pandora’s Box of the PC was broken open decades ago and people want control of their applications on their desktops. We can talk about how wonderful it is to share information and data, but people don’t want to share their work.
The other problem is that no one really wants to trust their work to some computer out there somewhere which is always one busted Internet connection away from being completely inaccessible. It’s one thing to keep data you use less often out there in the Internet cloud somewhere, it’s another thing entirely to keep data you work on every day out there in Web-land.
I don’t buy this. I immediately thought “one busted hard drive or one busted display screen away from being completely inaccessible.” I think in the next ten years we’re going to evolve to the point where we are less aware of where our data lives. We may have local copies and we may have remote copies across the web and these will remain synchronized as our connectivity comes and goes. It’s not necessarily completely simple to do, but some workable scheme will be developed to make this a whole business lot more transparent than it is today. Indeed, some work in this direction was done years ago with SynchML.
Ultimately the success of online office productivity apps like word processors will, I believe, be heavily dependent on exactly this type of local and remote file storage with synchronization. It’s not that hard to notice when files are different and give people a chance to accept or reject changes. This has been going with software code under development for decades, and it can similarly be done for word processors and spreadsheets.
The second article I read was “Microsoft: Google Spreadsheets is so 10 Years Ago” by Nicholas Carlson over at internetnews.com. I have no complaints with anything Nicholas said because this was a news article vs. an opinion piece. It does however prompt me to hand out my first “I Read the Memo and Stayed on Message” Award. (Note to IBM Comms people: I’m giving the award, so I will not be trying to win it myself.)
Anyway, today’s recipient is Microsoft’s Heather Gillissen for her comments:
Thanks, but no thanks, Microsoft spokesperson Heather Gillissen told internetnews.com. She doesn’t think Excel users need the help.
“Google’s new spreadsheet product is just an imitation of functionality that many other vendors already deliver,” she said.
“The innovations we’re delivering in Excel in terms of new usability, new visual user interface advancements, support for collaboration and business intelligence with things like Excel Services are so far beyond [Google Spreadsheets] that it’s like watching a time machine from 10 years ago.”
The memo to which I am referring, and I admit I have never seen it but am just surmising its existence, evidently says something like “thou shalt compare all other non-Microsoft office products to software from 1996.”
Google is the second one to get this treatment. The first was back in March when we saw the ZDNet headline “Microsoft: Office ‘10 years ahead’ of OpenOffice” in an article by Ingrid Marson. Corel, watch out.
I’m being facetious but really folks, you’ve got to mix up your messaging a bit better, we keep track of these things.
By the way, I’m guessing that in 2016, people will be looking at desktop wordprocessing, spreadsheet, and presentation apps strangely and saying “Those look nothing like what we use now online. They remind me of that popular office suite from 2006. What was it called?”
Bob, I’ve been working on local copies that can be synched remotely across the web for over 8 years now. That’s how long ago I was introduced to Lotus Notes. So there is already a simple and more than workable system that has been in place for a long long time. Nothing to wait for :). With the productivity editor integration into Hannover and opening up Notes via Eclipse the circle will be “complete”.
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.
Bob,
I think you’re exactly right to question/doubt the validity of the statement, “Web-based applications have not replaced, and will not ever replace, desktop-based applications.” Maybe we have a generational issue here. I think that many, maybe even most, younger people live their lives tethered to mobile devices. And I think that mobility is already assumed by them in how they communicate, access info, share data. The services component of that is arriving as we speak.
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.
The fear about storing data on a server is of the same nature as the fear some people used to have with banks. They didn’t trust banks, and didn’t put their money into the bank. They’d rather keep it in cash under their mattress with that false impression of greater safety they got from keeping their money under direct control… Clearly people got over that. I think the same will be true with online servers.
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.
FWIW, I’ve suggested – ever so gently – to Matusow that Microsoft should really open the source of MS Office 95/97 under the Microsoft Community License, since they’re not supporting it any more … ;) That now seems even more apposite, since everybody’s got that ten-year itch ;^)
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.
[...] You have to laugh at this one – couldn’t they come up with something different? There’s also a great discussion going on in the comments section. A time machine back to 10 years ago eh… so what does that make Excel 2003??? [...]
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?
Vincent,
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