Google has just announced that they have acquired Tonic Systems, a company which has already been developing in this area, with the aim of releasing in the summer. According to a post on the Google Blog (incidentally by Sam Schillace, who we interviewed previously for the podcast):
We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.
This is no surprise; they are building a comprehensive online office suite, and presentations were always going to be an integral part of that. As Sam put it in the post, presentations are well suited to collaboration.
It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them.
I disagree with Arrington. He does not believe Schmidt’s comment at the Web 2.0 Expo that he does not believe that Google Office competes with Microsoft’s product is genuine. I do think the comment is genuine; Google really does see their product as a collaboration tool, rather than a traditional MS Office equivalent. They’ve taken the very sensible view that rather than create a rubbish traditional office suite by using a technology not really appropriate, they will create a product that does one thing, collaboration, extremely well, without trying to compete against Microsoft, whose desktop application will always be able to provide more features.
Dare I say it… in creating a more simple collaboration oriented office suite, I think Google may be unintentionally competing with Microsoft. Not directly of course, they are two separate products: however I think that people (and smaller businesses) value simplicity over powerful features.
The only roadblock for this might be some better printing support and a WYSIWYG view for printing (think Microsoft Word’s “Normal” view). Once that’s done, I think Google really has the total package for many smaller businesses.
Sure, they are only competing unintentionally…
It just so happens that they are offering a similar product with the same purpose and only slightly different features.
But where you’re wrong is that it has a fundamentally different purpose. It is a completely different niche.
It can’t be called competition if it would make no sense to transfer from using ms office full time to GOffice full time. People still have to by MS Office.
I don’t see why it would make no sense. If someone has all the features they need in GOffice, why buy MSOffice? To that end, I think that the GOffice suite is indirectly competing with Microsoft. It may not be intentional, but as long as Google is taking away money from Microsoft due to a similar product, there is competition. (At least as far as Microsoft and I am concerned!)
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but I don’t think there is any reason to say ignore the ultimate effect of this announcement.