Google Introduced Online Spreadsheet Software
June 6, 2006
Google Inc. began rolling out its new online spreadsheet software today to a limited few in a move that sees the web maestros taking on Microsoft's Excel with a completely free alternative.
At 9am EDT the company began accepting sign-ups for the new product through it's Google Labs site. The software will be released for public use after the initial product is tested by a limited audience, much like Google's Gmail email service.
Google's key focus for the product is the sharing of information, to ensure friends, family and associates can access the same information from different locations. User-friendliness will be paramount, and this may provide the largest threat to Microsoft.
See the spreadsheet for yourself on Google's sneak-peek of the new software, there's even a sign-up for interest link so you can get your hands on the freebies as soon as possible.
The first reviews with more pictures are already published:
N. Godbout’s Blog
Dream On's Blog
Techmag
ZDNet
Comments
Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager: It's nice to share
Interesting
Dude…Google has to be afraid. They are rolling out so many new products, but are not able to stick with them.
1. Google Answers … http://answers.google.com/ – An excellent service. Researchers were hand-picked after being passed through some rigorous tests. Customers paid to get quality research done, and the price is very cheap for the kind of quality you can get. Yet, it paid the researchers well enough, and a lot of researchers survived on that kind of income.
Current situation: Email Notifications have stopped working and no one at Googleplex is replying. They have removed Google Answers from the services link. They are slowly killing it
2. Google Search Engine: The very thing that “made” Google. Today, Google search engine’s quality has gone down a lot.
Has Google actually invented anything? Have they come up with anything unique?
Search engines existed before Google came up with it
eMail existed before Google came up with it
Their current range of products is a MS-Office clone
Text ads existed before Google came up with it
Satellite pictures existed before Google came up with it (Terraserver)
Maps & driving directions existed before Google came up with it
Picture organizers & photo albums existed before Google came up with it
In fact, Google didn’t come out with any of the latest things. They have bought out companies who have the cool stuff – Writely, 2Web, Keyhole, Picasa etc… so Google is nothing but a large corporate house buying out the smaller players. I agree Microsoft does that too, but at least they create a lot of stuff on their own.
Google seems to be focusing on quantity and not quality. A lot of the marketing decisions have been crap. They are still thinking like the bunch of Stanford PhD students who founded the company. Typical PhDs…. they come up with new stuff….show it off to the world, and forget about it forever!
I agree, they don’t invent new applications. But what makes Google’s portfolio so attractive is not worldshaking new software, but the way they optimize it.
Before Google you had Altavista and Yahoo. Google came up with the smart idea to clean the lay-out and make algoritmes that give you what you really are looking for. This made Google such a popular website. Same thing goes for Google Earth. Yes, you can find all those images on the net. But what Google did is make it much more easier to get to that information. They made an application that was user-friendly and provided the pictures fast and easy. Gmail, just another e-mail application? No. It became second-Best Product of 2005 (according to PCWorld). And this is not because it is just another Google-application. First of all it offered huge storage possibilities without any charge. It had the strength of Google Web Search in finding mails. Next to that it also is very user-friendly and has a clean lay-out. It’s just refreshment if you are a former Hotmail-user. Anyway, I don’t have to point out that Gmail is a great product, just search for reviews.
You do have a point that they aren’t very inventive, but why do you have to be so inventive if you are great in optimizing current software? Ofcourse it doesn’t benefit the small companies who do put creativity into their software, but that’s capitalism. And just compare Google with the other big companies like MS.