This week's highlighted research:



Gartner Inc. "Google signals real goals with spreadsheet offering"

Nucleus Research. "Top 10 IT predictions for 2006"

Jupiter Research (Analyst weblogs). "Google spreadsheet - it doesn't even sound right."

Google's at it again. By that, I mean they are once again attempting to expand their sphere of influence beyond the search realm, something they've gotten good at and certainly have the resources to accomplish. The newest addition to Google's stable of businesses is a web-based spreadsheet application, which can be shared by up to ten users.

The big question is, will it take any share away from Excel? Probably not right away. Rather, my own conspiracy-laden mind sees it as a single step in a long-term strategy designed to create a full set of online applications, which may one day complete against not only Excel, but the whole Office suite. But, it's going to be a long road from here to there. Gartner makes a similar speculation in its report, reminding us of Google's earlier purchase of the online word processor called Writely, as well as their expansion of their search capabilities.

The idea of a shared spreadsheet is a useful one. There's definitely a market for a product that would allow several individuals in multiple locations to work on and view a spreadsheet simultaneously over the Internet, particularly with more people telecommuting and working for "virtual" companies. However, Google's not the only one here. I sometimes work on collaborative projects and use a wiki called Socialtext, which lets several people collaborate on text documents. It's enormously convenient. Socialtext has acquired a shared spreadsheet product called wikiCalc. Normally, a company the size of Google could swat a small company like Socialtext like a fly, but Socialtext has something big going for it: wikiCalc was created by "Mister Spreadsheet" Dan Bricklin, the inventor of VisiCalc--for you youngsters, this was the world's first computer spreadsheet. WikiCalc is open source, which means users could alter the product to suit their own needs, but in reality this is not that great an advantage in the consumer market. Consumers don't want to tinker with code, they want something that does what they want it to do, right out of the box (or in this case, right off of the screen), so the open source advantage would in reality be an advantage to only a small group of users.

Gartner's report makes note of the fact that the Google spreadsheet does not offer the same level of functionality as a full desktop suite (such as Excel), but then maybe it doesn't need to. Google's short-term target is the consumer base, and users who would presumably not require high-end spreadsheet functionality. The report notes that Microsoft continues to dominate the enterprise user space, and Google isn't trying to compete against that. Instead, Google is looking at consumers (and perhaps the SOHO segment) who have become more comfortable with the concept of social networking.

Nucleus Research also made similar predictions last year in its "top ten predictions" paper, in which they predicted that Google will continue to challenge Microsoft's dominance of the consumer desktop. Jupiter Research's analysts say in their blogs however, that they don't have much faith in the idea, saying that it is very unlikely that any IT manager would agree to replace Excel with a web-based spreadsheet. True enough. Before the Google spreadsheet (and whatever Google suite they may be attempting to create) could be useful at the enterprise level, the products would have to have equivalent functions, and would have to be secure. And you can bet that when Google gets close to having a full suite of online, shareable productivity applications, Microsoft will be right on its heels.

ITworld.com

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