Is it time to throw the good ol’ Microsoft Office (or perhaps Open Office) away? Google has announced the test release of its latest addition to its over-the-web office lineup, Spreadshets.
Why the lock-down? Can’t this be yet another user-invite service like Gmail was (or up to now is, in certain cases)? ForeverGeek probably has it right in saying Google doesn’t want to over-saturate the user base,
It is an invite-only service right now. I am guessing that Google learned from the past when they launched services like Pages and Analytics openly, only to have to lock them down after getting saturated with account requests.
I can’t wait to try out Google Spreadsheets. Interface would probably be similar to Google Notebook and even Gmail (i.e., AJAX and all that). However, one drawback I’m seeing is that load times would be slow on dialup. But then again, who uses dialup these days?
What I’m wondering about, though, is why Google didn’t launch a word processing Web application first. They’ve acquired Writely, after all. Or is Google in the process of assimilating Writely into its existing services? Maybe they went for the spreadsheets first, because of an existing platform on which work could be done, such as Google Base and other apps that allow spreadsheet uploading. What’s great is the collaborative aspect of all this. You can actually share your spreadsheet to your Gmail or other Google contacts.
Kudos to Google for yet another app that we’ll all end up wanting! When will the office suite be launched?