RSSGoogle PowerPoint, Wiki Software on Tap
By the Betanews Staff | Published September 4, 2007, 4:02 PM
Google could launch its online presentation and wiki tools at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, news reports indicate. With the addition of those two products, Google is able to offer users a complete suite of productivity applications at no charge. It also puts the company into direct competition with Microsoft's Office suite.
It was at last year's Office 2.0 event where the company unveiled its Docs and Spreadsheets applications, which came out of its acquisition of Writely and its own work on an Excel-like application. The company said earlier this year that it would be using technology acquired from Tonic Systems to work on a PowerPoint-like application that would be released sometime this summer. Some believe this to mean that this year's event is the place for the debut of the two new applications.
Can Google stop playing me-too now and get back to innovating? Let's see, after MS scrambled to catch up to search, mapping, Google Earth, analytics, ads and adwords, Gmail (storage increases), and web calendar, now they're sitting on their butts doing almost nothing lately. Tweaking Picasa for Linux? Docs/Spreadsheets is still barely half-done IMHO. Groups needs some integration help. And now a new Powerpoint clone? What's going on at Google these days? Are they turning into Microsoft?
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You know - with all of the clamoring about Google having access to and using the information that they gather from users searching the web, I wonder why no one has stopped to think what they might do with the data that people are saving in the various online office products of theirs?
Who's to say they aren't indexing these and/or mining them to see what people are recording? Also - how secure are their servers? Would you be willing to risk your financial statements (business or personal) and of your confidential business reports, etc on their servers - either for a hacker to gain access to or for Google's own edification?
Why isn't anyone questioning this?
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I use Google Docs for some things. It is by no means a full Office suite replacement, but for a free on the go set of tools, it is not bad.
Much better than being locked into M$ proprietary software and having to pay outragous prices to use _your_ documents. ODF in Google Docs is a win/win proposition.
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Google is really pressing for their corporate use of these products too. For small businesses, with limited resources, having access to a suite of office type tools supported outside the organization is very powerful and appealing. I would assume that the security is appropriate but I don't have much information on that. But to get real adoption of these document applications they really need to address offline editing. Not everyone has access to the web at all times...
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If it wasn't google then it would be worthless. There are numerous free online productivity suites out there. But because it will be apart of the growing number of services already offered, gmail, calender, documents and spreadsheets, photos. This will definetely be a great system for schools, home use and even some small business use. It's free, so can't go wrong there.
Google certainly isn't the first to do these things but typically they put a twist and not to mention make it free.
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