Google Docs Archive

Randall Kennedy is out today with a bold prediction, "Office will clobber Google Apps, eventually driving the search giant out of the hosted applications business altogether." He says that there are three major reasons this will happen: full office functionality, true offline access and the future of windows application development is the streaming office.

 Will there be a showdown between Google Office and Microsoft Office? Sure. Will Zoho play a part in this showdown? Yes, if Yahoo acquires them which I think might make sense. IBM could also make a run for Zoho. However the showdown won’t only be about the office suite – it will be about the full Web offering. The full offering includes more than just the office, other products like advertising, analytics, social media, search, local, travel, etc will be included in the battle. This is where the real showdown will take place. On the grand Internet stage, not on the smaller office suite stage.

Both Google and Microsoft will continue to add features while keeping the cost as low as possible and even take an income hit to move user adoption up. Both companies have very large bank accounts and the battle will certainly put some amount of hurt on their free cash.

Just wait until the Google and Microsoft salespeople sell-in full, exclusive packages. That’s where the real blood will start gushing.

Google and Salesforce are announcing the launch of "Salesforce for Google Apps" today at no cost to Salesforce customers. Adam Ostrow at Mashable was part of a demo last week and has details on the deal. Adam notes that the following Google Apps are now integrated into Salesforce: Gmail, Google Talk, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. Salesforce also integrates Microsoft apps into the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce has a platform which allows developers to build upon called AppExchange and with the deal launching today with Google, you can now build apps that leverage both regular Salesforce and Salesforce for Google Apps.

Will this make Google Apps sexier to the enterprise market that Salesforce serves? Ostrow says yes. I suggest maybe but in the long term (4-7 years). Switching isn’t as easy as it looks. I do agree with Ostrow that this is a win for Web apps. I believe this marriage with Google and Salesforce is a large win for the small to medium business, not the large enterprise customer.

Google has announced a new feature within their Google Docs application today and I am impressed. Currently the spreadsheet application they offer allows you to share the entire sheet for others to edit. But what if you want someone to just add rows of data as they would in a database? Google is now offering a simple forms plugin for the spreadsheets the reminds back to the old days of vbasic into a Paradox database.

With this new addition, you need to email the form out to anyone with an email address. It won’t be long before you can put the form onto your Web site or blog I am certain. The new data is added to the Google Docs spreadsheet which keeps the data organized and current. It could be a replacement for a basic php/mysql combo since you can work with the spreadsheet as if you were in Microsoft Excel.

This could be the most useful feature in Google Docs to-date. Once the forms are embeddable on Web sites, this feature will be a game changer especially if it has an easy insert into Blogger, WordPress, MT, Drupal, etc.