When is a Spreadsheet not a Spreadsheet

Google is releasing a new on-line spreadsheet today (look for an update later).  And Nick Carr beat me to what I was going to say.  Nick says:

So why would Google put out a product that makes its arch-rival's product more valuable? Because Google doesn't want to compete with Office. It sees Office as part of the existing landscape, and it wants to build a new layer of functionality on top of that landscape. No one is going to stop buying Office because Google Spreadsheets exists. But what they may well do is use Spreadsheets for sharing Excel and other data online - rather than just emailing Excel files around, as they used to.

This is pretty much what I was thinking ... see the Google spreadsheet as an intermediary.  You aren't going to build a ten-page pivot-table-laden spreadsheet on-line.  But you can use it as a great dashboard.

But, I still see Microsoft running ahead of Google here and not getting credit for it.  After Microsoft ate Ray Ozzie, they had Groove.  Groove 2007, while showing all the  MSbloat  it can (it's huge now), is a great Peer to Peer system that allows a very deep level of collaboration. I'm not seeing this coming from any of the thin client Google applications. 

I understand the reason for having things like Google Spreadsheet and Writely and what not, but they are so thin as to be nearly TRS-80 in usefulness in a modern environment.  I loved my TRS-80s (all three of them), but I certainly don't come into the office and boot them up any more.

Google's goal here is to build web services.  These are the ground level web services.  I'm very interested to watch them evolve and I'll play with them.  But use them for a serious endeavor?  Probably not.

Update: The world's most boring screencast of the Google Spreadsheets can be seen here.  I beg someone to remix these and put them to some hyped up music.

 

Photo: Tandy

 

Comments

[Sid Steward]

OT: Love the 'Model 1' snap -- brings back memories.

[Dan Ciruli]

Remember also that along with Excel 2007 Microsoft will release Excel Services, which enables collaboration on spreadsheets stored on a server via a browser. It also allows the creation of web services that use spreadsheets to do the calculation.

[Jay Fienberg]

Along the lines of my recent re-evaluating of email, I've also been re-evaluating the spreadsheet.

In some ways, I think spreadsheets, like email, can be part of a less techy-centric / tech-company-centric web.

Spreadsheets essentially created the modern information worker--they allowed people who were less than hardcore techies to create their own information services. "Send me those numbers, and I'll paste them into my spreadsheet and get you the answers you need".

Spreadsheets are like user-centric open apis and microformats!

I wonder how many of the O'Reilly elements of "web 2.0" can / will be replaced with hypertext aware spreadsheets and email programs :-)

[Jim Benson]

I miss the model 1 snap. I miss knowing that the computer was on or off. I miss serial application - one at a time, in only that I miss being awestruck by Ashton Tate's Framework and the awesome power of being able to use data between applications.

But I rarely pull out even my MacSE, let alone an old Model III.

Jay, what do you think of SocialText's incorporation of wikiCalc?

Obviously, since I miss my Model I, I miss Visicalc too. I even have a few versions of it lying around. But, I'm not sure I'd go to a wiki for my calc'ing.

[Jay Fienberg]

wikiCalc is cool. And, I don't see Google's entry into the online spreadsheet world as super significant, in itself. I do see the spreadsheet itself as super significant, and I imagine that a true hypertext spreadsheet (hypersheet ?) would be even more so.

I don't think wiki-izing a spreadsheet is a necessary step in the path twoards the kind-of full-on hypertext spreadsheet I am imagining. But, I know some of the folks at Socialtext see potentials for hypertext that really haven't been implemented yet on the Web. So, maybe they'll do something really amazing / unusual with wikiCalc.

[Jim Benson]

I can see that. and ... I'd like to see that.