Google trying to excel at spreadsheets

Posted Nov 17th 2006 10:31AM by Tom Taulli
Filed under: Consumer Experience, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT)

I recently talked to an MBA student. Like many of his peers, he uses a lot of Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) services.

However, he was fairly disappointed with Google's spreadsheet. He told me, "I spent a lot of time with it," he said, "but it didn't have the features I needed."

Well, that may change soon. This week, Google purchased an upstart spreadsheet company, iRows.

Yes, iRows is a great product. But, like many Web 2.0 offerings, it has been no easy feat to get critical scale.

And, while Google denies that it is making a move against Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)'s Office, it does look like the opposite is true. Then again, it's a juicy market -- and in need of some old-fashioned competition.

Interestingly enough, by the end of the year, the iRows' service will be shut-down and the data deleted. What to do? Of course, if you want to save your data, you will have to export it to the Google spreadsheet.

You can check out more from the iRows blog.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

Tags: iRows, Spreadsheets

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

11-17-2006 @ 2:29PM

John said...

I agree. I use excel at work and I've tried out Google spreadsheets as well. Google's spreadsheets are ok for simply storing tables and such, but Excel is POWERFUL. There are so many features in Excel and you can pretty much do anything with it (writing macros, setting up formulas, etc). In the corporate world, nothing holds a candle to MS Excel I'm afraid.

11-20-2006 @ 12:00AM

Frank Zamani said...

Not all apps are suited for the web. Users simply don't get enough from a web based spread sheet in return for giving up all the power of Excel.

For an app to succeed as web-based at least one of the following must be true:
1. The app is multi-user, or collaborative/community-based by nature.
2. What the app produces is used primarily on the web.
3. Operating the desktop equivalent of the app is complex to setup and maintain or is expensive.
4. You only need the app for a very short period of time.

Incidentally we believe that our web-database service Caspio (www.caspio.com) meets the first three conditions.

Frank Zamani
www.caspio.com

11-21-2006 @ 3:37AM

Jason Grant said...

I think that Google's office solution is not competition to Microsoft becuase it is a purely web driven solution which is totally uniqutous.

It is very much unlike anything Microsoft has ever done before and it helps me work so much more creatively with other people over Internet.

www.flexewebs.com