Google has come out with a new service called Docs & Spreadsheets.(The docs part comes from a company called Writely that Google acquired some time back) That left me wondering. Who is the targetted user for this? A person who has a PC and internet access, but not have a word processing programme. Or the roving sales guys? Appears quite an unlikely scenario.
Luckily, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not about word processing or about doing spreadsheets. It is about collaboration, and word processing, if I may say, is just incidental.In typical Google style of understatement, this is quite feature rich, allows multiple users to collaborate on the same doc and mail it off .
The 'docs' part is reasonably okay, but I still cannot visualize a scenario where I would use it.It is compatible with other Word Processing such as MS Word and Star Office etc, allows you to save the doc in PDF mode(a good value add). The spreadsheet part, to say the least, is quite sad. As Amit Agarwal pointed out, it does not even have the feature to create graphs.
But then, the fashion these days is to launch a software, and then take it to beta later (Blogger!). But once again, coming back to the earlier question of targetted user. Not sure this will see any significant adoption. Hang on Google. You are trying to take on Microsoft too fast. And on this on atleast, you are not appearing surefooted.
Luckily, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not about word processing or about doing spreadsheets. It is about collaboration, and word processing, if I may say, is just incidental.In typical Google style of understatement, this is quite feature rich, allows multiple users to collaborate on the same doc and mail it off .
The 'docs' part is reasonably okay, but I still cannot visualize a scenario where I would use it.It is compatible with other Word Processing such as MS Word and Star Office etc, allows you to save the doc in PDF mode(a good value add). The spreadsheet part, to say the least, is quite sad. As Amit Agarwal pointed out, it does not even have the feature to create graphs.
But then, the fashion these days is to launch a software, and then take it to beta later (Blogger!). But once again, coming back to the earlier question of targetted user. Not sure this will see any significant adoption. Hang on Google. You are trying to take on Microsoft too fast. And on this on atleast, you are not appearing surefooted.
Comments
Pertinent questions. Have linked to your post and put my views on my blog as a post. You may enjoy going through it. Do let me know what you feel about it :-)
@ Mayank, I read your post, thanks for the link, your views on your post are highly contemplative.