Google Gains on Microsoft Office: Software for Workgroups

(As printed in GWB 11/06)

You may have heard some buzz about “Web 2.0”. While all of our 401k’s have been recovering from the DotCom collapse, many companies have been busy quietly building the Web 2.0 second-generation of online website applications that emphasize sharing data and working collaboratively in groups.

This collaboration has been made possible by capitalizing on what Thomas Friedman calls the “flattening” of the world in his book “The World Is Flat”. Essentially, in the late 90’s, billions of dollars of fiber optic cables were overbuilt all over the world allowing anyone from anywhere in the world to transfer data, voice, and applications over the internet for a close to zero marginal cost. This was happening just as we had all begun communicating using the same tools and the same interoperable PC’s on the same operating system (largely Windows).

Taking advantage of this “flattening”, Google has spent millions on a gaggle of companies that write collaborative online applications that do not need to be installed on your PC, but give you many of the same features. One such company is Upstartle which produced a word processor called Writely and was consequently gobbled up by Google.

Microsoft Office includes Word, Excel, Outlook and Visio to satisfy PC customer needs for word processing, spreadsheet analysis, email/calendaring, and flowchart/diagram creation, respectively.

Is Google attempting to take on MS Office with its new fleet of online collaborative tools? Some think so.

The general strategy seems to be to take the 20% of the functionality that we use 80% of the time, mix in collaborative capabilities and make it free. Offering it free, presumably increases site visits and creates content that Google stores on their server farms to create better search results. The fact that these documents are stored on Google’s servers, and not on our PC, frees us up to access the documents from wherever we are with whatever browser we are using as long as we have an internet connection.

Gmail, Google’s free email service, has already been here for a while and has continued to raise the bar on free email. But, be careful, they use the content of your emails to create targeted ads. (Experiment with this by sending an email with lots of references to pigs, for example, and you might see ads for bacon.)

Google “Docs and Spreadsheets” is the integration of Upstartle’s Writely word processing application and the Google Spread spreadsheet application into Google’s fleet of online applications. You invite collaborators by email and give them the ability to edit the document or spreadsheet.

For example, your 4-person workgroup could be collaborating on an end of year report, with each person responsible for one section of a 4-section report. In the pre-flattened world, you would have each person email their MS Word documents to the entire group to give status updates, with one person responsible for integrating all the changes into one document. With Google Docs, you can each edit and update the document online and the changes are made immediately and are visible to all the editors in your Workgroup.

You can then export the Google document to many different formats including MS Word, RTF, Adobe Acrobat PDF files, or HTML. Google Spreadsheet will export to Excel format.

Google Docs also tracks revisions, the text edits and formatting changes that each person makes to the document. This allows you to compare different versions of your document, who made the changes, and at what time they made the change.

There are some drawbacks – for example, when you insert pictures and then export the file, the pictures are sometimes resized incorrectly. Cutting and pasting to and from Microsoft Word is still not straightforward as the fonts sometimes change and cause artifacting or leave XML code. In Google Spreadsheet, you start out with 100 rows and have to manually add additional rows. Each row addition takes a 1 or 2 second delay while you are editing online, which can be prohibitive when you are trying to increase productivity.

Google Calendar provides you with a free online calendar that offers layering and sharing capabilities. You can add events or meetings which become searchable by Google and then layer your personal calendar, for example, on top of your work calendar, allowing you to view both at the same time. You can then allow different people to view your work calendar vs. your personal calendar.

Gliffy.Com provides a flowcharting and diagramming tool very much like Visio. Use it to create floor plans, process flowcharts, and simple diagrams and then export them to a picture in JPG format for use in a report or presentation. Google does not yet own Gliffy, but it seems a likely candidate for takeover.

In the end, Google provides users with more options, provides their servers with additional information to create more relevant search results, and provides the software world with a healthy dose of competition, which benefits all of us lucky Web 2.0 consumers.