Why a Google Spreadsheet?

There's been a lot in the press about the new Google Spreadsheet. It's in an limited beta now but there have been some reviews. It's a very very basic spreadsheet that works in the browser. The data lives on google's servers. It's obviously not going to displace corporate use of excel, certainly not in it's 1.0 release.

So what's it good for? Well a friend says it would be great when sharing a document and having people in different places update it. He gave the example of the seating plan for their wedding. Also it would be easy to access his home remodelling budget from home and the office. Those are two reasonable examples but I'm not sure they come up frequently enough to make it worthwhile for Google to create a new product for.

So what is Google doing? ars techinca thinks it's "about promoting open file exchange and, eventually, the ODF file format". I find this hard to believe. First, (as the article points out) the Google office products don't support ODF. If that format was the reason for the product, it would be in the first release. Second, they say that Google should support open formats since they are easier for them to index than closed proprietary formats. That may be true, but ars points out that Google Spreadsheet can already import .xls files. If they can import, they can index.

So what is Google doing? Google does want to index more information to make their search better (and improve their advertising). They've probably already hit the limit of what they find by crawling the web, so they have to get info in more ways. Borrowing from the magic of letting the users build the content (like amazon and ebay) it makes sense to have users give Google the info directly.

Google Video is a way for people to upload the video's they make because that wasn't so easy (though YouTube seems more popular now). Picasa is the same for photos.

The "SketchUp acquisition makes sense too. Imagine people augmenting Google Maps and Google Earth with accurate 3D models of places they're familar with. It might look like the accurate 3D wireframe maps of Japanese navagation systems. You might start getting models of the inside of buildings. Companies might even do it themselves to make it easier for customers to find them. Use Google Local to find a chinese restaurant when you're travelling and get a map with up-to-date landmarks entered by locals.

Google's database is a way to get people to enter items directly too. Some suggest it's so they can compete against Amazon and eBay by having sellers themselves enter the stuff directly into Google. I think they are a long way off from that, though it would be an improvment to the perpetually beta Froggle model where Google has to crawl and parse everyone else's web pages of items for sale. They did just migrate the froogle merchant info into Google Base for just this reason. How long until Google Catalogs goes the same way? With Google Base, Google gets the metadata entered by the users. Imagine if wikipedia-like projects start to add to a public free database all the plant species, dna sequences, various parts databases, cddb, etc.

People don't only search for where and what, they also search for when. Online calendars have been particularly weak and I hope Google Calendar can change that. What's going on in my neighborhood this month? What good jazz concerts are in my area? The problem with the current crop of these tools is there's either not enough info entered or some fanatic has entered too much info to sort through. Add some intelligence to it and it could be very useful. And of course they already had Gmail which gives them a way to personalize ads to what's in your mail (and therefore is something you're more likely interested in), so a calendar made sense.

If you think about the various ways people could add info to google you quickly understand their acquistion of Writely. If you're going to ask users to enter a lot of info you might want to give them more than a HTML text box. With Writely google can make it easy to enter descriptions, reviews, comments, events, etc.

So what about Google Spreadsheet? Here I think they went a little to far. Above I've justified a word processor, database, mail and calendar. All that's missing from an office suite is a spreadsheet, so why not do that? Forbes had an interesting article Who's Really Running Google? that talks about how difficult it is to rein in all those geniuses. Adding a spreadsheet is cool. There are lots of spreadsheets out there so wouldn't it be better if they were easier to enter into google too? I'm not so sure. Sales forecasts, customers lists and other businesss spreadsheets you don't want found by others. Same for most personal ones too. They also tend to have numbers and just a few labels so I don't see it easier to custom tailor ads (I see you have months in your data, how about these products for May, or these products also cost $39). I expect this will live in beta for a very long time.