RSSGoogle to Offer Online PowerPoint Rival
By Ed Oswald | Published April 17, 2007, 4:11 PM
Even though Google continues to claim that its online productivity suite is not intended to compete with Microsoft's Office product, its latest addition is beginning to raise eyebrows.
The Mountain View, Calif. company disclosed Tuesday that it is about to release a presentation and slide show tool in the coming months. The product would join its word processing software, released last August, and its spreadsheet application, launched in October.
Technology acquired from its buy of Tonic Systems will be used in developing the new application, engineering director Sam Schillace, who said the company hopes to release the product by the summer.
Confirmation of the existence of an application came first from CEO Eric Schmidt during a presentation the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, when he revealed the slides were created on the product. But as before, he continued to deny that Google was attempting to compete with Microsoft and Office.
"We've already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets," Schillace said. "It just made sense to add presentations to the mix."
TechCrunch's Michael Arrington said he expected the latest application to be added into an offering for small businesses by Google called "Google Apps for Your Domain." That offering already matches (if not exceeds) currently-offered services from Microsoft.
On Google's claims that the offering was not a threat to Microsoft, Arrington said that was "complete spin."
The irony is that if MS sues them for anti-trust, they would be admitting guilt for what they did in the 90's with the browser wars. The shoe is on the other foot.
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|What did they do in the "browser wars"?
I'm sorry, but anyone who claims that IE killed netscape just wasn't in the industry at the time, or just wasn't paying attention.
Netscape killed itself with horrible management, a complete inability to communicate effectively with its employees, and failure to listen to it's customers. It's just that no-one noticed until a competing product showed up. It didn't have to be IE. It could have been anyone able to market to a large percentage of users.
People were dying to jump ship. Same thing happened when FF showed up. MS, thankfully, got their s*** together quickly and fought back.
Netscape just fell over and died.
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|nice...for nostalgia I am still holding onto my Netscape CD :D. People are always quick to lay some sort of blame instead of actually knowing. My current favored browser, IE...anyone elses is their choice! hehe
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|well, the word ane excel online are surprisingly useful in sharing docs for non-business use.
For business use, you sort of get caught in the whether it's secure or not question.
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|I've been trying to make them all work for a business environment, but the suite lacks so many basic features. Features that were in Lotus 123 more than 10 years ago. I wouldn't recommend it for anything more than casual home use. The suite is nowhere near powerful enough to suffice for basic business needs.
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