Google

Now, hopefully everyone's heard of Google Spreadsheets. Its yet another addition to a growing list of Google services such as Notebook (which I use in my research), Calender ( which I use to keep me updated on when the next World Cup Match is) GoogleMail, Blogger, Pages and Google Talk. Now this is by no means a definative list as I've probabaly left a few out. I've some interesting posts on this from TUAW, Church of the Customer Blog and Innovation Creators, if you'll bear with me.

Now I spent about an hour last night adding each and every World Cup Match to my Outlook 2003 Calender. I labeled them ( from a limited list of choices/colors) and I categorised them by group ( A, B, C, etc). Great, now that can be, in the words of Bruce Sterling, tagged ,ranked, searched and sorted. Ok, no tagging or ranking, but you get the point here. I can search by group or by team, by date or by time. So I exported the calender to Google Calender. No categories, nothing. All I get is, well, a calender. I can add a description, I can invite people to see my event (more on this, in a minute), I can see a map of the location. Its all rather good. In one sense, anyway. You could arguably call google calender, well, not too many nice things shall we say. It lacks the inherent sophistication of Outlook. Now people who need those features still need to use Outlook. But for the rest of us, Google Calender is just fine. I've tried integrating Windows Live Local ( via the plugin they offer at their site) into Outlook to get maps of meeting locations but it dosen't seem to work. So Calender is good. Above all there is somthing about being able to access all of this information from any computer on the planet. This seems to be the same for all Google services.

I use Google's Personalised Homepage to get a birds eye view of whats going on. I have my news down one column, my date, time and science/space news down the middle and everything else on the other column. So at a glance I can see everything I need to know. Its great. The elegant simplicity both in looks and in ease of use of the page is rather enviable.

GoogleMail is downright brilliant. You can chat to people, you can send email from another account, and a couple of other things too. Not to metion that you can search your mail. Again its simple and pleasing to use. While I still use Hotmail on the odd occasion I like the GoogleMail's UI a lot better ( OK, before you point out Windows Live Mail, it does have a better UI than Hotmail. I still need to try it). Again, you can access mail on their from any computer in the world.

Notebook is very, very good. You download a Firefox extension that sits in the status bar and waits for you to tell it to note something. Its simple : you can add, delete and edit notes. You can create a new notebook and you can search your notebooks. Its dosen't get any simpler that that. It works.

Blogger looks good, from the blogs that I read that are hosted there. But I liked wordpress better.

Now I haven't used Google Spreadsheets yet. And I'm not a regular Excel user so I wouldn't know about all the fancy features that are not on Spreadsheets. But my view is that as long as you can do formulas that's all you need. Again, for the vast majority of the Excel using population of the world ( OK, I overdid it there), Spreadsheets is going to be a convinient way of working away from your main PC. Now I'm not saying that people en masse are going to switch to Spreadsheets as their prime spreadsheet program, but I'm saying that they will use it to store data they need to access from elsewhere.

Inevitably, there are a number of different opinions out there.

TUAW asks : Is Google slowly creeping up on .Mac?

Hawk Wings found an interesting post from Nick Starr that briefly outlines how Google is doing a decent job of matching up to the offerings of .Mac. While Nick has a good point with observing that some of Google's key products are similar to .Mac's offerings, such as the Blogger/Pages combo (aka iWeb) and their recently released Browser Sync extension for Firefox (aka Safari syncing)

Ok, Google is going after both Apple and Microsoft: A little competition never hurt anyone. But he does add this cautionary note:

Taking a step back from all this, it sounds as though services like Google's are simply striking a chord with a few unique killer features that are enough to entice some users (and, obviously, their price tag can't hurt either). But ultimately, I simply think it's too much of a leap to label some loosely entangled 'Web 2.0' services as a complete replacement for the sheer power, ease of use and 'no waiting for a refresh' aspects of desktop applications and operating systems that many users might be missing out on.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Church of the Customer Blog has an interesting perspective on Google. I did point out the community aspects I found: Inviting people to view your Calender/events, inviting people to see your spreadsheet and chat in Googlemail. But this is what they have to say on this:

Forgive me, Eric, Sergey and Larry, but building community is not a Google core competency. Perhaps your view is that it's not required; community isn't necessarily essential to the growth of every company. But if community was a Google core competency, then:

• Google would have hundreds or thousands of employee blogs as Microsoft does. A preponderance of Google's 5,000+ employees would have qualitative, first-hand knowledge of what the Googlesphere is loving, hating or wishing for. A case could be made that Microsoft's 2,000+ employee-bloggers today have a much better idea of what their highly involved customers think about Microsoft's various products, systems and processes than they did three years ago.
• Google would host multiple customer input points — product-specific forums, in-person events, frequent power-user meetings, to name a few — as eBay does.
• Google would have social search capabilities prominently built into all of its products (as Yahoo is doing). If this were the case, Google would have released a much-better version of Google Video than it did. Google Video competitor YouTube clearly has established community as a core competency. YouTube's social media functions have propelled it into a high orbit of popularity and usage.

Google competes with Microsoft and Yahoo on multiple fronts, not to forget dozens of smaller, more nimble companies like YouTube that have been founded with community as a core competency. So if Google is to maintain its enviable stockmarket ride, it should be doing a far better job of focusing on community as a core competency.

Never thought about any of this. Very interesting. Read the post

One last interesting post over at Innovation Creators commenting on how an integration of all Google's services could change the process of creating reports in the businees enviroment:

In a real world business example, think about building monthly management reports. Today, in most companies, the CEO ends up seeing reports that are build by knowledge workers who cut and paste information from spreadsheets and word docs into a final report.

In most companies, this can't be automated because the process is not fixed. The boss always wants to look at something different, or examine things in a new way. The nature of our highly competitive global economy means that companies have to behave like this: always changing the way they do things to stay ahead of the competition.

…

To continue with our example of the management reports, imagine you are running a chain of donut stores. You have each store manager create a Wiki page each month, with information about sales. The information can include both contextual information and raw performance data in a Wikicalc spreadsheet.

Rolling this information up to a central source becomes easy. Just link the cells in a summary Wikicalc spreadsheet.

When the store manger updates the figures, you have the latest information. Adding an extra report on an ad campaign becomes trivial. Showing the auditors an input chain is just a matter of giving them the ability to click through the system.

…

The best Web Office solutions will blur the lines between wikis, blogs and existing office tools to create a simple, structured mashup platform that empowers knowledge workers and facilitates a new level of flexibility, reusability, searchability and internal cooperation and communication.

Once again, read the post.

So, in summary, Google offers somthing for the casual user. And if I were Microsoft, I would be making it easier for the casual user to access those powerful features (cue the new Office 2007 UI) rather than follow Google. But that's just me.

Any thoughts?