{"id":417,"date":"2006-06-06T10:22:20","date_gmt":"2006-06-06T16:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=417"},"modified":"2006-06-06T10:22:20","modified_gmt":"2006-06-06T16:22:20","slug":"googles_office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=417","title":{"rendered":"Google’s Office add-on"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google Spreadsheets, released in beta today, is being touted in both the print and online media as a challenger to the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel – part of Google’s mythical “Office killer” suite of online applications. The New York Times headline<\/a> runs “Google Takes Aim at Excel.” CNET says<\/a>, “Google Spreadsheets turns up heat on Excel.” John Battelle is more blunt, summing up<\/a> the move as Google’s way of saying “FU, MSFT.”<\/p>\n

This view, while understandable, strikes me as being a complete misreading of Google’s intent. What, after all, is the single most important feature of Google Spreadsheets? The single most important feature – by far – is its compatibility<\/i> with Excel. You can export an Excel file into Spreadsheets and import Spreadsheets data into Excel. Spreadsheets is not an alternative to Excel so much as an extension or an add-on to the program, one that, in essence, provides a simple web interface to the Microsoft application. To put it into terms<\/a> I’ve been using<\/a> recently, Spreadsheets is a complement<\/i> to Excel. It actually makes Excel more useful – and hence more valuable. Let me repeat that: Spreadsheets makes Excel more valuable.<\/p>\n

So why would Google put out a product that makes its arch-rival’s product more valuable? Because Google doesn’t want to compete with Office. It sees Office as part of the existing landscape, and it wants to build a new layer of functionality on top of that landscape. No one is going to stop buying Office because Google Spreadsheets exists. But what people may well do is use Spreadsheets for sharing Excel and other data online – rather than just emailing Excel files around, as they used to. If Google Spreadsheets competes with a Microsoft product, it competes with a Microsoft product that doesn’t yet exist: Excel Live, Microsoft’s own web interface for Excel data.<\/p>\n

Google, as it has itself said repeatedly, is not interested in fighting old wars. Microsoft won the war for spreadsheet applications. Google’s fighting a new war, a war that’s barely begun. It’s the war for web services. And it knows that, for the foreseeable future, these services will not displace desktop applications but extend them. Google is happy to make Excel more valuable as long as it also encourages greater use of the Internet and, in particular, attracts more traffic to its own sites. In a way, Spreadsheets is not only an Excel complement; it also turns Excel into a complement to Google’s own services and the lucrative ads that those services carry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google Spreadsheets, released in beta today, is being touted in both the print and online media as a challenger to the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel – part of Google’s mythical “Office killer” suite of online applications. The New York Times headline runs “Google Takes Aim at Excel.” CNET says, “Google Spreadsheets turns up heat on Excel.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}