The Heat is On: Spreadsheets on the Web 2.0

I recently visited the homepage of SocialText, because I got invited to a SocialText Wiki which will be used for preparing a F2F gathering in San Francisco end of month. (I am not a huge fan of wikis but it is common wisdom, that a wiki is good for this purpose. Let's see.) For those, who do not know SocialText: it is probably one of the most professional and well known companies in the Wiki arena, offering the setup of Wiki-Workspaces for corporate clients and workgroups. The founder and CEO of SocialText, Ross Mayfield is one of the most outspoken evangelists for using Wikis in the corporate environment and has coined another buzzword Enterprise 2.0, denoting the use of Web 2.0 technologies in innovative businesses.

It was not a surprise, therefore, to read about a new deal between SocialText and Dan Bricklin, father of the proverbial "killer application" VisiCalc, on the SocialText homepage: SocialText will distribute and co-develop a web based, collaborative spreadsheet called wikiCalc (does sound a bit like VisiCalc, does it? Honi soi qui mal y pense). Check it out here.

wikiCalc is not alone. Last week Google announced Google Spreadsheets (from the company 2Web Technologies, which they bought earlier this year). Already on the market for quite a while is ZohoSheet.

Technorati Tags: ajax, googlewatching, web 2.0

Personally that's a very interesting development for me. The five applications I spend most of my time in are probably

• Email: Gmail 
• Calendar: Google Calendar
• Word Processing: MS Word
• Presentation: MS PowerPoint
• Calculation: MS Excel

I already played around with Writely (now part of Google). And while it certainly is not a substitute for Word in its current incarnation, its much better equipped for easy collaboration on a medium length text. wikiCalc was nice but still looks a little clumsy. I have yet to see Google Spreadsheets BTW: Does anyone have an invitation for Google Spreadsheets left and does not know someone who still needs one? I would be willing to volunteer!

A good assessment of Google Spreadsheets can already be found in the blogosphere of course. Check out Nicholar Carr, for example, or Assaf Arkin. The best assessment of this development, IMHO, comes - as usually - from Ismael Ghalimi at IT|Redux.

If by replacement they mean feature-for-feature match, then Google Spreadsheets is indeed a long way away from replacing Microsoft Excel, even though I tend to believe that it should be technically feasible within three to five years. But nobody cares for that, or at least very few people do, and that is precisely why I believe that Google Spreadsheets or Zoho Sheet will eventually replace Microsoft Excel. Because most Excel users do not use its advanced features, a simpler online alternative will be good enough for them, and if it happens to be free and provide good import/export capabilities for Excel’s proprietary format, the vast majority of Excel users will simply never upgrade to Microsoft Excel 2007, and will eventually make the switch to Google Spreadhseets or similar alternatives, mainly for convenience reasons.

I don't believe this to happen very fast. Excel still runs rings about the new Web 2.0 contenders - not only featurewise. Usabilty is a big issue, too. But there actually might come the time where I will move another part of my daily workload to the Web 2.0. Probably it will be a while until I can abandon Photoshop and Powerpoint - but I guess, that by this time next year I might use an online spreadsheet and word processor more often than Excel and Word.

Hint: Check out this page on IT|Redux for the best collection of Web 2.0 tools for the office space. (The list is produced by a dabbledb application, btw, a current favorite of mine when I want to show off a really smooth Ajax application.)

Comments

[David Lee]

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