Google shoots Microsoft, reloads for Adobe, looks for others

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky, Hardware, Operating Systems, Software, Web

Greedo - HanGoogle has yet again offered for free what others decide to outrageously charge for. Welcome to Google Spreadsheets, an online spreadsheet application that can work with both .csv and .xls files. Once again, this is all about the true meaning of Web 2.0 – making the internet more valuable. With the addition of Writely, this is signaling the beginning of a web-based Office-type application.

Microsoft Office is currently in a rebuild, and estimates were that sales would be expected to reach $20 billion by 2011. With the inevitable addition of document management to GMail, these numbers will be seriously jeopardized. After all, why spend the estimated $679 on Office 2007 Ultimate Edition when 99% of what you do is simple document creation? This is nothing but bad news for Microsoft, count on either severe price reductions or serious sales problems. In the meantime, Microsoft shares don’t seem to be responding well to the latest news from Mountain View, CA, and are down a half-percent in the last 30 minutes, to $22.38. Google, however, has gained 5% in the two hours since the announcement of its tap into the $20 billion Office cashflow.

Add this latest development to Google Earth, an application that negates Microsoft’s Terraserver, and Google’s recent jostle to the 3D modeling space with its acquisition and free offering of SketchUp.

One could easily see the conversion of this 3D design software to 2D to compete with Adobe’s vector-based design application, Illustrator. Add this development to the addition of PDF translation in Google’s search portal; Adobe is being pressured on multiple fronts.

2006 is shaping up to be the year that Google goes after all of the heavy hitters in the industry, simultaneously.

My predictions for 2006-2007

  1. Google Adds document management to GMail by adding online storage and a ‘My Documents’ sidebar.

  2. Google launches G Office to bring together the office apps Writely and Spreadsheets.

  3. Crystal BallGoogle adapts SketchUp to be a basic 2D, vector-based design application to compete with Illustrator.

  4. Goobuntu is confirmed as being in development/available for beta, with the help of Sun Microsystems. It will be offered as an installed OS by Dell. Microsoft Vista prices drop from their estimated $450 to XP Home’s $200. It won’t be enough.

  5. A network appliance will be launched to locally host your own G Office web application, with limited success.

  6. Further development into municipal WiFi will result in a slew of Google app ports for mobile devices, such as GMaps and GLocal.

  7. Development in Mobile apps will result in concentration on local, location-relevant searches for Froogle, GMaps and GLocal.

  8. GMaps will integrate public transportation as optional routes to the user.

  9. Google Groups will be refined and integrated into the Gmail app, which is now more like Google Portal than a mail app. Corporate users will be able to have private groups for online collaboration. Around this time, IBM will start gearing up, as they’ve owned this sector for years.

  10. Google will get tied up for a few years in the legal system as companies go after them for being a monopoly, a victim of their own successes. It will be determined that there was adequate competition in the marketplace, but the ‘don’t be evil’ model won out over the ‘force them to a product, then charge what we want’ model.

Oh,

11. Google hires me to manage the think-up-ideas-and-make-them-into-prototype-apps department in R&D. I realize I forgot all of my possessions as the plane lifts off an hour later. :-)

Comments (13) | June 6th, 2006

13 Responses to “Google shoots Microsoft, reloads for Adobe, looks for others”

  1. The Technocrat Says:
    June 6, 2006 at 11:00 am

    Ooh, I forgot to add another one – on the ‘possible’ list.

    MAYBE: google copies the format of allofmp3.com, realizing that its business and pricing is far superior to iTunes and other DRM’ed junk, and completely obliterates this nonsense that is the music industry’s idea of a valid business model.

    (OK, maybe I’m a little biased – but one can hope)

    Hey, maybe Google will even start offering to sign the artists directly, and directly give them the profits they deserve via micorpayments in the system. Hmm, people getting paid for their art, and not giving up $ to fund an irrelavant business model, good idea.

    This might never happen. Google seems to absorb talent rather than partner with many people…not that it’s bad, just doesn’t seem to be their style.

  2. Cameron Scholtz Says:
    June 6, 2006 at 12:07 pm

    The biggest customers of Microsoft Office are corporations. An online spreadsheet is a nice toy for college kids and hobby users. But when we’re charging clients (and getting paid) for our work, we need serious office tools like Excel and Word and Visio.

    The other thing I find interesting about the Google apps is that no one really uses them — other than nerds. On the other hand, EVERYONE uses Word, everyone uses PDF, and everyone who works in a office uses Excel.

    The future of computing will see more server-based internet apps. Howevever, these are also easier to write (at the moment) meaning anyone can create them. And as Google becomes more evil some users may choose smaller, friendlier vendors.

  3. taoski Says:
    June 6, 2006 at 1:23 pm

    I agree with Cameron.

    I use the online apps all the time, Writely especially, but the corp i work for will always use Excel.

    Maybe when M$ make a web enabled version of excel or something that can sync local and network copies easy then that will be a real breakthrough.

    Well done to Google though, but its not like anyone else has’nt done this already ina web2.0 flavour: see…..

    http://www.irows.com
    http://numsum.com
    http://www.editgrid.com
    http://www.numbler.com

  4. The Technocrat Says:
    June 6, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    Oh, I definitely agree it has its place. I’ve also heard my fair share of CIO’s look for ways to cut their licensing costs. Consolidating 200 users from licensed office to a single, local Google-office appliance? I think more than a few would bite.

    Probably not enough for it to be considered a rousing success, but enough to make the point that corporate locally-based office web applications are a viable alternative to licensing, especially at the prices they’re estimating for Office 2007.

    I suppose the attractiveness of these options depend on how much training a company is using to leverage their investment in Office. Most of the office workers I know/have known use less than 5% of the features in Word and Excel, possibly 2%.

    If 90% of my workforce were using Word/Excel to 5% of its capability, I’d definitely look into the value of training them to use it at a more advanced level, if it would help them do their job. If 10% of my ‘under-utilizing workforce’ could use the training, that is still 81% of my overall workforce that isn’t using/doesn’t need the more advanced features in Word/Excel. Cutting my Office licensing by 81% could mean a huge windfall for a company with tens of thousands of employees. (Not to mention that you don’t need Windows Vista to use web applications, you could easily cut the Windows licensing for these users also if all of your proprietary apps were web-based – Lotus has been facilitating this for years)

    Well, like I said, this is all probably highly dependent on industry/skill level/needs, but from the companies (including Fortune 500) I’ve seen, a significant portion of the workforce doesn’t use Word of Excel past the functionality those programs had several versions ago.

    Along these same lines, I’ve never seen anyone in a corporate setting use PowerPoint for more than slide effects. No multimedia or anything. However, PPT might be a sole reason to keep Office, as most of the sales corporate America depend on it.

  5. The Technocrat Says:
    June 6, 2006 at 1:27 pm

    I’ll try to keep the length under control in the future
    :-)

  6. iiq374 Says:
    June 6, 2006 at 4:16 pm

    Cameron – I almost agree. Our corp also currently uses Excel exclusively for spreadsheets etc – but one of the major issues is the lack of real collaboration and a way to share it well.

    We use Domino to provide that – but some users just find that too cumbersome at the moment and I could easily see them switching to use something like this during the documents creation and editing lifecycle.

    The interesting thing is at the end of that cycle I would think it would then have the “save to .xls” option used and the Excel version given to clients or stored in the information repository. So it still wouldn’t do away with MS Office – but it would certainly diminish its use

  7. The Technocrat Says:
    June 7, 2006 at 2:27 pm

    #iiq374: just curious, what version of Domino?

    I’m an IBM Certified Lotus Professional (fancy-talk for Domino 6/6.5 Admin). I found v6.5 to be very un-cumbersome, and apparently 7 is awesome, although my current place of employment uses exchange (non-profit, got exchange for free…hard to argue that one)

  8. iiq374 Says:
    June 7, 2006 at 3:24 pm

    Technocrat – running 7.0.1 on the clients, 7.0.0 on the servers.
    Def we’ve been using here since 4.5 (urrgh), 5.0 was still a dog, 6.0 was starting to look up, 6.5 was relatively nice, and I quite like 7.0

    The next release (Hannover) looks simply incredible.
    But even some of the freebies (like 10 user Blackberry enterprise server) that come through now are quite cool!

    In terms of the mai client as a mail client I have to agree that Outlook is easier to use, and faster. But the notes client is way more powerful (its a bit of a Linux / Windows argument there ;->).
    But there is no comparison on the server side. I am our systems / network administrator, even though my “real” role is an Implementation Consultant. There is no *way* I could get away with paying less than an hour a week attention to Exchange like I do with Domino!

  9. Nick Barrett Says:
    June 7, 2006 at 3:48 pm

    Sounds like good stuff…if they manage to provide all those services (hopefully)

  10. The Technocrat Says:
    June 8, 2006 at 9:17 am

    iiq374 – nice. at my last place, we went to 6.0 two weeks after I started from Groupwise (i think that’s what it was called – never bothered to learn it…anyway, Novell’s mail system)

    By the time we were a few months into 6.5, we had the whole org doing massive amounts of sametime/quickplace stuff, and about a dozen people on blackberry’s. This was a company that hadn’t changed their business model since the 1970′s!

    I even wrote my own sametime bot and web portal so clients could IM our sales people directly. Very sweet. And I don’t remember having any major issues that weren’t self-created. And no virus problems at the desktop (for the rest of you out there, Notes doesn’t use a browser to display mail, so most worms, etc, don’t work too well.)

    All of this was just install and go, too. Hardly and config to do.

    Compare this to the exchange server i inherited at my new place, and I’m in reboot-hell, with 1/10th the functionality I’m used to, and more web-access and malware issues than I can shake a stick at…

    I remember just keeping tabs on the Domino Win2K3 mail cluster for months at a time and not having to do a thing, except create/delete user accounts.

    Time to make a Domino demo machine, and show my current org what they’re missing… :-)

  11. iiq374 Says:
    June 12, 2006 at 4:18 pm

    Interesting the point you make about Viruses. We have the same experience here. In my 5 years here we have never had a virus outbreak despite most of our users operating with Laptops and out of the office on disparate LANs etc.

    I suppose you don’t need to know that the sametime client is just part of the webmail template now ;-)

    I would seriously consider the demo machine – too many people use the license free excuse to use Exchange to their detriment. The loss of productivity is normally way more than it is worth. Even if you don’t go to Domino there are a couple of Linux based mail servers compatible with Outlook that would cut your admin overhead considerably!

  12. The Technocrat Says:
    June 12, 2006 at 8:56 pm

    yup, the st integration in 6.5 was the only way we were able to roll out “another” communication method.

    What I’m finding very interesting is the game of catch-up Google is playing with IBM. Forget Microsoft, I say Google’s going after IBM Lotus. Think about it – compare GMail with integrated GTalk. Now add the new calendar.

    It’s a web-based Notes 6.5. Google still doesn’t have a way to rival Domino’s app platform, but it’s not far away with its customized homepage that can be pointed to any web contact.

    Seriously, I’d look for them to roll out a corporate-level hosted GMail/GTalk/Calendar solution. If they make it easily to customize, they’ll be pretty dangerous in the small- and medium-sized corporate-collaboration arena.

    —–

    Jeez, I sound like I work for them. Hmm… I can be reached any time through this site, Google… :-)

  13. Amado Sires Says:
    March 10, 2010 at 5:19 am

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