Google Spreadsheets - what's next?

Google writes letters and performs calculations. What's the next thing one could imagine - Presentation? Well, today Google launched the Google Spreadsheets at spreadsheets.google.com and its already in the beta testing phase and the line starts at the other end of the world. So get in line if you are not as the spreadsheets is about to kick some ass. Luckily I got my login to beta test the spreadsheets and at the first look - it looks nice. The feel of AJAX is amazing. First it was GMail and now every other application from Google harnesses the full power of AJAX and Asynchronous Dynamic JavaScript. Thanks to AJAX, otherwise the spreadsheet app would have been a typical POST and GET World Wide Wait. So what's the big deal of this - why are people making such a big racket about the release? For one thing, the information technology era is progessing really quick and people now want information available to the global set of people at the speed of their of their thought.

Microsoft's Office is good - power packed with Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and oh, Outlook. Lets look at Excel - its VB programming interface is amazing and people can write macros and spread viruses at the speed faster than that of the photons in light. But what if I wanted a group of people to edit my document and I want to be able to see all the changes immediately. That's not possible in the current versions of Office Excel. Rumors are that Office 12 will rock the world with its collaborative sharing editing - lets see how that will turn out, if I can spare 400 bucks from my salary. So that brings us to the next big thing - cost of the software. Agreed that Office is very powerful but it is very expensive. Simple home users do not want to shell out so much money on document editing SWs. openOffice does the job pretty well for a smaller price - $0. For companies, I agree, it is worth investing money on Office as the productiveness of the company depends on how easy we make it for its contributors to work.

Lets consider the world from the perspective of others - we want a simple SW, not so expensive to buy and use legally, that can perform our word editing, calculations and not only save it but allow authorized others to contribute to it and thereby provide a means of collaboration. Then we wouldn't need to worry about geographical stations of our colleagues and also not worry about file locks taken by others thereby putting the burden on one person to merge all the changes to the document. Why is this concept so complicated? The whole idea of computing revolved around the personal space of an individual and information was confined to limited publicity. I guess the computer revolution and the descent of the Internet made the claustrophobic information unleash itself out to the world and there needed to be a way to tame it and control it. Google is one of the tamers of such information - their mission is to collect all the information in the world and make it available to everyone else in the world at the touch of finger - "I'm feeling lucky"

Information Globalization - now people do not want to share documents by right clicking and clicking "Sharing and Security", nor do they want to email stuff around for people to edit it and collaborate. They want the information to be on the Internet and yet, be available only to a set of people, who can simultaneously collaborate, edit, delete and save documents online. Writely was one such venture and Google very cleverly bought it before Writely became a monster on its own. Now Writely is under the flagship of Google. Then Google came out with its own spreadsheets online - spreadsheets.google.com and its rocks.

I tested the spreadsheet's initial capabilities and its amazing - I can invite different people to edit it, chat with them all and see all their changes - all in the same window with AJAX controls that are as smooth as cutting through butter. I sent an invite request to another email id of mine and now I opened 2 windows with the same spreadsheets and started to edit it. Voila - both the windows updated their contents pretty much instantly and it felt no less than an application installed on the local computer. I tested out some basic formulas and it works and of course Excel savvy folks will miss out on a lot of the features, but hey who cares - I have a spreadsheet that I can share with the rest of the world and I don't have to worry about locking the file away forever. I still have not gotten to rough testing the spreadsheets and I would love to do it once I get some time around.

Security - One thing that still lurks in today's world - how safe is your information on Google's servers? Of course you wouldn't want to keep your company's confidential information on this spreadsheets YET, but for most of the purposes, Google spreadsheets serves my purpose and its free. Once this concept of online collaboration picks up momentum, I'm sure we are going to have better tools to keep that information much more safer than now. But for now, I feel the information is safe, as you need to enter your password to enter into the spreadsheets and only invited people can view the spreadsheet.

So, whats next? - PowerPoint/Impress - presentation.google.com - that will be starting to drive Microsoft even more crazy. But its amazing how the world has changed its perception to information globalization in just a under a decade. Happy spreadsheeting and also have a nice weekend!