Google Takes Over The World!

The big tech news over the last day or so is Google buying YouTube for $1.65BN. Certainly a big, fat, hairy deal in the media world and for the future of media disintermediation, as discussed recently.

But lost in that blockbuster M&A activity is the refinement of an older Google service, online word processing and spreadsheets. Google has had free to use word processor called Writely for many months now. No application needs to be installled on the computer and files can be stored online or on the local PC. This week they have added an olnine spreadsheet and opened docs.google.com for business. Search Engine Watch wraps it up but Barry Ritholtz asks the important questions:

Three questions about this:

1) How easily is it to integrate Excel -- a desktop app -- into the website versus a internet-based spreadsheet?

2) Have these free web based apps evolved to the point where they are a legitimate competitor to Excel?

3) How much share can this steal?

This is a far more refined app than I previously perceived it to be . . .

To which I respond in the comments:

Let's look at your questions.

1. If you noticed when you were playing with it, one can import and export not only from .xls formats but also other common file formats. I uploaded a cash-flow statement on multiple sheets here. So, the answer this question is: pretty easy.

2. At the basic and middling-advanced levels -- which is the core competency level of about 80% of the people using these apps -- it looks feature comparable. I don't see pivot tables and graphs... yet. But again, for basic stuff like budgets, pro-formas, schedules and simple statistical analysis it looks pretty good in comparison to Excel.

3. Let's look at Mister Softee's pricing on Office 2003:
Office Student and Teacher (Academic Only) $149.00
Office Basic (OEM Only) $184.00
Office Standard (Lowest Cost Retail) $399.00
Office Professional $499.0o

Google Office: Free.

That said, the Open Office Project has offered a feature-complete, very compatible with Office free desktop suite for more than three years now. The 2.0 release is very good performance-wise on newer hardware. Yet OO (and StarOffice, the Sun Microsystems non-free version for Sun OS) only have about 14% of the enterprise market.

On the third hand. Google has cachet. The Google apps are absurdly easy to use and do not require a download or install. I think this kind of thing just sends big shivers down the spine of Mister Softee.