news…

This actually worries me. There’s a risk putting trade secrets on Google Spreadsheets, although it beats being hit by a virus. I don’t think Google is interested in changing this, they”ll probably appeal more to people who do mundane stuff.

But SaaS vendors that target business users can easily offer encryption to keep data from prying eyes. You get reliable backup, end of installation hell, not to mention blinding fast security fixes.

All this has changed.

I’m sure there are limitations to online spreadsheets when it comes to huge datasets and complex calculations. That’s where companies get to innovate and sell better solutions.

I didn’t run into any of these limitations because I’m not a demanding user. I think a lot of people fall into that non-demanding user category. And that makes it an interesting category to watch.

The Google appliance range currently delivers Google search functions for Intranets. In addition to search, future Google appliances will offer a complete Office suite that runs over an organization’s Intranet.

Plug it in | Turn it on | Presto… an instant Office suite server accessible via a browser. Thick clients, thin clients, Windows, Mac, Linux… it will support them all. It also adds an interesting perspective to the recent alignment of Dell and Google whereby Dell will manufacture and supply the appliance hardware for Google…

About ten years ago I ported on old version of Lotus 1-2-3 to Java and made it a downloadable applet. Lotus subsequently productized it.

What we all learned was that as long as we kept the functionality (and thus the applet size) down to a bare minimum, load time over the network could be made to be just barely acceptable. But as it turned out the functionality was not sufficient to build a real application.

The AJAX-style spreadsheets suffer from an even worse problem, which is that they seem to send every calculation up to the server. This results in annoying wait times for even very simple data entry scenarios. I can’t imagine what that would be like in the case where there are millions of users and/or large data sets (e.g. matrices).

Worse, the prospect that a host will index your data and keep that index around for its own purposes should scare all of us.

Now I entirely agree that sharing is a compelling feature, and this is part of the motivation behind Excel Server.

I recently visited the homepage of SocialText, because I got invited to a SocialText Wiki which will be used for preparing a F2F gathering in San Francisco end of month. (I am not a huge fan of wikis but it…

Blox was an AJAX application. A very advanced one.

I think that your point about the adoption being a bottom up adoption (I mean average users first and advanced users at the tail) is interesting and could be an interesting troyan horse. It will be interesting to watch and see if that prediction become true.

Regarding Google, I truely believe that they are purely a consumer, add-driven company, and that everything else is just a way to proactively defend themselves against Microsoft and to distract them. Think about it, with a few million dollars and a handful of smart engineers, they can run an experiment and make Microsoft loose some sleep. Why would they not do it? Does it make them a competitor to Microsoft in the enterprise? Not really.

Have a good week end,

-Edwin

Actually, it runs on cheaper hardware better than some AJAX applications I’ve used. I don’t think cheap is a compelling argument for moving online. Convenience is.

First of all, let me tell you how glad I am to meet another BPM expert who is expressing such an interest for Office 2.0. It’s yet another confirmation that both subjects — BPM 2.0 and Office 2.0 — matter.

Then, please let me answer your objections:

Web browsers have improved, something like AJAX is finally working.
[Edwin] I do not buy this. Blox was a far superior implementation: cut and paste, formula replication, column and line manipulation.
[Ismael] Much like Flash and Flex are more advanced than plain AJAX, but AJAX is free and does not require compilation or server-side transcoding. Therefore AJAX will succeed (already did) where Blox and many others failed.

Complete suites are available, not just spreadsheets.
[Edwin] I do not buy this. Most of these suites are not really integrated. No mash ups, not cut and paste, no single sign on.
[Ismael] Indeed. And more problems are listed on the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker. A lot of work remains ahead of us. But I am willing to bet that what we’ll get by the end of the year will get very close to the first version of Microsoft Office in terms of functionality and integration, and will offer a lot more in terms of collaboration capabilities.

Users are more comfortable with web-based interfaces.
[Edwin] I buy that. But I am not sure that this will be enough because interfaces like Blox did not really grasp adoption with advanced users.
[Ismael] But that’s exactly the point! Advanced Office users won’t be the early adopters for Office 2.0, for they need Office’s advanced features which are missing in Office 2.0 so far. Early adopters for Office 2.0 will be casual Office users. Much like early users for personal computers were casual computer users. Just remember the use cases people used to justify the buying of a personal computer in the late 70’s and early 80’s? Doing basic accounting. Storing recipes. Playing games. Very casual activities, compared to what the big-iron computer guys would do. Casual users will drive early adoption for Office 2.0.

Broadband is available to many more users.
[Edwin] This is true, but again at the time Blox emerged, I was at Netscape and we had plenty of bandwith.
[Ismael] Indeed, but because only Netscape and a few others had access to such bandwidth, you could not benefit from the network effect that is available today. And this network effect is what comes out of the collaboration features that make Office 2.0 different and valuable.

Web services are available, hence making mashups possible.
[Edwin] I buy that and this could be with some of the collaborative aspects the thing that could change the desirability aspect of those solutions. It would be really nice it there was a Web Macro feature allowing users to plug and play various functions available on the next as services or ATOM feeds.
[Ismael] Agreed!

A viable competitor to Microsoft has emerged (Google).
[Edwin] I do not buy this. Google is a consumer company. They do the spreadsheet thingy just because it is an easy way to hurt and distract Microsoft.
[Ismael] I do not know about that. Google’s users are consumers, but Google’s customers are corporate buyers. Does it make Google a consumer company? I don’t think so. At the end of the day, both Google and Microsoft are going after the same market: the next computing platform, built for the Internet, and their users will be both consumers and corporate users. The real question is how they will make money from serving such users. So far, Microsoft charged its users, while Google charged corporate buyers, who essentially become sponsors for a service that is provided for free to a large user base. The long-term viability of these two business models is the most difficult question as far as I can tell.

Large markets that cannot afford Microsoft Office now exist (China, India).
[Edwin] What about OpenOffice?
[Ismael] It’s a good free alternative to Microsoft Office for power users.

I will try to play devil’s advocate because I think that it would be interesting if we could be more explicit:

Web browsers have improved, something like AJAX is finally working.
I do not buy this. Blox was a far superior implementation: cut and paste, formula replication, column and line manipulation.

Complete suites are available, not just spreadsheets.
I do not buy this. Most of these suites are not really integrated. No mash ups, not cut and paste, no single sign on.

Users are more comfortable with web-based interfaces.
I buy that. But I am not sure that this will be enough because interfaces like Blox did not really grasp adoption with advanced users.

Broadband is available to many more users.
This is true, but again at the time Blox emerged, I was at Netscape and we had plenty of bandwith.

Web services are available, hence making mashups possible.
I buy that and this could be with some of the collaborative aspects the thing that could change the desirability aspect of those solutions. It would be really nice it there was a Web Macro feature allowing users to plug and play various functions available on the next as services or ATOM feeds.

A viable competitor to Microsoft has emerged (Google).
I do not buy this. Google is a consumer company. They do the spreadsheet thingy just because it is an easy way to hurt and distract Microsoft.

Large markets that cannot afford Microsoft Office now exist (China, India).
What about OpenOffice?

-Edwin

I have not used Google Spreadsheets for any real work just quite yet, but I do use Zoho Sheet on a very regular basis, for very real work. For example, all my cross-country flight planning is done with it. You can see an example of an actual navigation log here. It includes fairly complex trigonometric formulas used to implement E6B-type functionality, which was a good way to test the solution. I exported the spreadhseet and imported it back into Google Spreadsheets. It worked perfectly, but I could not share it with you for you did not use a gmail.com email address.

But anything that runs on the Web, you can try the moment you hear about it. And you can use it side by side. You don’t import all your data, you just edit a spreadsheet that someone shared with you.

And that’s a huge speed up in adoption rate. Look at the adoption rate of landline phones. Compare that to cellphones. Compare that to Skype.

I commented before that there is no connectivity problem. There’s a hard core group of people who work on their computer from the back seat of a cab, on flights, in the forests of the Amazon.

But the main part of the bellcurve are always tethered when they use their computer (and I include WiFi in that).

I couldn’t disagree more with your analysis.

Have you actually *used* Google Spreadsheet for any real work?

See my comments here.

With all due respect, I must disagree. Back in 1999, Altavista was working pretty well for me as a search engine, but when Google came along, I and many others switched pretty fast, and in less than three years, Google established itself as the leader.

The reason for this is low switching costs. Now that Google Spreadsheets and Zoho Sheet can cleanly import and export Excel spreadsheets and are available for free, switching costs have been significantly reduced. Once they add support for macros, they’ll be even lower. At that point, I would expect a significant user base to make the switch, and start publishing and sharing spreadsheets online. This will fuel a viral marketing push that will accelerate the transition.

And last time I checked, Gmail was pretty popular too, for similar reasons…

Now, where I agree with you is that very few organizations will be able to deliver an enterprise-class Office 2.0 platform to a large customer base. And when I say very few, I mean less than the number of fingers I have on one hand. Will Zoho be part of them? If wish them that much success, but I cannot really tell, for it depends on their ability to execute, especially on the marketing side. Will Google be part of them? You can bet on it. How long will it take: as you said, about 5 years.

Stay tuned…

You’re right on! And let’s not forget that Microsoft established its dominance by addressing the needs of SMB users first. Office 2.0 will establish itself in the marketplace by doing the same.

Office “2.0” will be somewhat of a reality in 5 years, but it’ll be evolutionary and certainly not revolutionary regardless of how much you try to convince yourself of it. By then you’ll need to leverage your existing user base (that’s both residential and business) and provide a highly connected, seamless online and offline solution to be the champ. That’ll certainly not be Zoho or any of those startups, and I wouldn’t bet on Google Office beta for anything else than a marginal marketshare (did you check the Google apps adoption rate lately)?

While I generally agree with you, I encourage you to look at SharePoint’s Excel integration. You can flip between a list view and an editable Excel view and an export with dynamic links to actual Excel cells with one click. It’s very powerful. Our latest product is built on SharePoint and we use it internally. I find myself using the direct Excel integration almost daily. However, I would note that the online integration is really no Excel (it has limited functionality), which would lead me to definitely agree with your argument that a “good enough” online version is enough. The problem lurking for Microsoft is that 90% of the users use 10% of the features. To some extent this is why SF.com was so successful over Siebel, and PeachTree or QuickBooks still beat Oracle Financials out for the SMB user.