Thursday, February 28, 2008
Google ‘Not-Office’ Finally Completed
We don’t think it’s a competitor to Microsoft Office. It’s casual and sharing, and a better fit to how people use the Web.”
–Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, April 2007
We are not in this to get Microsoft. We are in this to offer more compelling choices for consumers and businesses.”
–Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s business software division, April 2007
Soldiering on in its quest not to compete with Microsoft’s (MSFT) core office-productivity software business, Google (GOOG) last night added another component to its Web-based productivity suite–Google Sites. Created from JotSpot, the hosted wiki platform Google acquired back in 2006, Sites is essentially a lightweight version of Microsoft’s business-collaboration program SharePoint. It offers organizations a means of instantly creating a wiki-style group workspace, in which employees can collaborate.
It’s another powerful addition to the Google Apps suite, which already includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs and Spreadsheets and Page Creator. And it’s free. And if you think of “free” as a euphemism for “not robust enough for enterprise use,” you best think again. At least that’s what Google says, anyway. “The so-called lightweight cloud application isn’t for the non-power user,” Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, told News.com’s Dan Farber. “It’s actually for the power user. Today’s power users aren’t writing macros. They are ‘power collaborators,’ grabbing content from six different places in the cloud and putting [it] on a site and sharing it.”
What was that Schmidt said about casual users again?
