Google Office Top Ten Talking Points

Google have dominated the technical news headlines since Tuesday with the launch of Google Spreadsheets, and everyone seems to have an opinion. Just to be different, here are my top ten "Google Office" talking points:

(1) What has happended to the Writely acquisition? In order to "kill" Office you have to launch products, not just acquire them.

(2) When Writely has been "integrated into Google's systems" will it have interoperability with Word document formats?

(3) Not everyone will have the $500 dollars or so purchase price for Office 12. It's unrealistic to say that a Google Mail / Word Processing / Spreadsheet package that's free and offers document interoperbility with the Microsoft Office Suite will not be attractive to large numbers of non-corporate users.

(4) If the 80:20 rule appplies to Word and Excel, and you're in the 80% of users who use only 20% of the functionality, why would you pay for something you don't want, when what you need is free?

(5) If Micrsoft can secure Office 12 against the levels of piracy that previous versions of Office have suffered, non-corporate users are going to need a cheap (free) alternative.

(6) Startups with no IT department will find a (free) Google Office Suite an attractive proposition.

(7) Where's the Google Search in Google Spreadsheets?

(8) Will Google have a PowerPoint killer anytime soon?

(9) Is this Google strategy about competition or is it about disruption? Is some competition with Microsoft such a bad thing anyway? Competetion has generally driven Microsoft to produce better products.

(10) Would you bet against Google?

Tags: Google, Microsoft, Google Spreadsheets, Google Office, Microsoft Office