The Google Collective
As you may know, Google's spreadsheets has lunched, albet in limited beta, a few days ago. Google aims to organize the world's data and make it available to us all, one way or another. This involves private/personal data (such as our email, our files, our money transactions(?), ..) and data available to the public domain ( accessible through Google search, Google groups, etc ). They are coming up with new products every few months, most of them being innovative in terms of design and features, power and ideas. They are combining them together ( which is of course the right thing to do ), so you can use Gmail through Google calendar and Google spreadsheets, your Google contacts through picassa web albums and so on, so forth.
So now they have this nifty Spreadsheets application. Its not Excel, it certainly doesn't come with all that featuresbloat, but then again who needs all that? maybe 0.5% of all excel users do. The rest of us, do not. Plus, its free, available from anywhere as long as you have a browser and access to the Internet ( ubiquitous nowadays ). Next thing you know, they 'll put the Writely buyout into some use and deliver an equally good word editor. Then, perhaps, some nice Photoshop like little application, that works well enough, exports to flash, interoperates with all other Google 'office' services and even with the non 'office' ones..
It doesn't take much thinking to see where this is going. Google is unbeatable. There is noway anything is going to stop them, unless they stop themselves by screwing up big, big, BIG time - which is not likely to happen. Meanwhile, Microsoft will be having a really hard time trying to deal with the Google guys. Given Microsoft's track record in the online services field, I would say that unless they do something radically better they will only help growing the distance from Google.
Google will own the world. That is not to say its a bad thing. As far as I am concerned, they deliver amazingly good services, they do things right [more or less], they are advancing based on their technological skills and not on tactics usually deployed by the likes of Microsoft, and, above all, everything is free for the consumers.
Friday, 16 June 2006 11:47 pm
