Tag Archives: Office

Gliffy – Web based Visio

Published Jul 3, 2006 | In Google/Yahoo

When I wrote about the making of Microsoft Office Killer, I was not able to list a competitive web based program for Visio. But now Microsoft is going to face threat even for Visio in the form of Gliffy.

Gliffy is a web based diagramming solution, similar to Visio on desktop. I was little skeptical when I first heard about it. But my opinion got changed on the very first look itself. It is pretty fast and very simple to use and has a ton of build in shapes and figures.

I was particularly amazed with its speed and it made me to wonder how it was implemented, particularly because none of the usual buzzwords like AJAX, Web 2.0 etc. were present. This is the problem being a web developer. You always look at a website from a developer perspective and never get to look at it from a user perspective. Within a couple of moments I found out that it was entirely designed with Flash OpenLaszlo. (Chirs, Co-Founder of Gliffy clarified that it was built using OpenLaszlo)
Well this may spark new discussion AJAX vs Flash but one thing is sure the guys behind Gliffy have really done lot of hard work and have done a wonderful job.

Here is the review about Gliffy from Lifehacker

Another great thing about Gliffy is that it keeps records of all your revisions, which makes collaboration a breeze – just add and remove collaborators who can access your document, and Gliffy takes care of the rest.

As with most web-based applications (so far), you may not want to move all of your projects online if you create diagrams a lot, but if you need to slap together a diagram every now and then but don’t want to pay the Microsoft premium for Visio, Gliffy looks like a solid choice

As clearly noted by them it may not (or may) fully replace Visio but Gliffy can be really handy when you have to just deal with a small diagram and you are left with just a browser and an internet connection. 😉

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Suggest me some features to compare online spreadsheets

Published Jun 7, 2006 | In Google/Yahoo

Google’s release of Google Spreadsheet yesterday has generated lot of sudden attention on online web applications especially those which are proving to be direct competitor to Microsoft Office applications.

In addition to Google’s Spreadsheet I came to know about a couple of other great products like Zohosheet, iRows, NumSum from Techcrunch’s article yesterday which are also targeting similar user base. So I thought of comparing all these online spreadsheets to get an idea about their pros and cons. (Nice weekend project right?)

So guys let me know your favorite features which you would expect from a spreadsheet program so that I can base my comparison on them. Also let me know if I have missed any other online spreadsheets.

Here are the links to the programs which I am going to compare

I will publish my results as soon as I finish them so stay tuned and don’t forget to leave your favorite features in the comments.

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Microsoft Office Killer in Making

Published Jun 6, 2006 | In Google/Yahoo

I first speculated that Google has been creating a Microsoft Office Killer when they acquired Writely around 3 months back. But the recent limited public beta testing of Google Spreadsheets really proves that fact that they are in fact building a Microsoft Office Killer.

Some might argue that this is just hype and Web applications cannot compete with native Windows desktop applications. But I somehow feel that Microsoft Office has become more complex these days and may be only 15-20 % of the people really need those complex features but for others the Web counterparts may be enough. Apart from the simplicity the other huge factor is cost. Most of the people would be comfortable in viewing a couple of ads on their web applications rather than spending a fortune in buying their Desktop counterparts. Added to all these is that the document could be stored in Google’s Server itself which prevents you from frequent backup pain.

So here is a list of products from Google competing directly with Microsoft Office Applications

  • Word – Writely
  • Outlook – Gmail
  • Calendaring (Outlook feature) – GCal
  • Excel – Google Spreadsheets
  • Frontpage – Google Pages
  • PowerPoint – I am 99.99% sure that Google is currently creating a PowerPoint killer. It’s just a matter of time before it gets released.

Apart from the main Office applications here are other applications for which Google has a competing product.

  • Picture Manager – Picasa
  • MSN Messenger – Google Talk, Hello Messenger
  • Windows Search – Google Desktop Search
  • Internet Explorer – Google Tool bar and Google’s support for Firefox.
  • Visio – SketchUP, a recent acquisition of Google

I think in the next couple of years (around the release of vista) there could be some stiff competition to gain the market share and as always it is we the users who are going to get benefited as a result of competition. Eagerly waiting to watch Microsoft’s next move. What do u say guys?

Links:

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Google + Writely = Microsoft Office killer

Published Mar 12, 2006 | In Google/Yahoo

Well, the news is out. Google has acquired Writely – The web word processor. I expected this to happen, but when I read about it for the first time at TechCrunch, I was little bit skeptical due to my experience with the Technorati acquisition rumor. I wrote about Technorati acquisition in this blog and then only realized that it was just a bit of Google Juice.

Now that both Google and Writely have confirmed the acquisition I can put down my thoughts on this acquisition.

When the rumor was out at Techcrunch, lot of people were of the view that Google doesn’t need to acquire Writely, but can build an in-house web word processor by just using the Gmail and blogger code as the base. But I think that Google did this not because of its inability to code but just to keep its competitors away.

I have been using Writely for nearly 4 months now and I should say that I am a satisfied user. The main reason for me to choose Writely was the ability to share my documents between my home and office computers. I was also using Writely to jolt down notes as and when I found something interesting when I am hooked on to the net. Previously I used to compose a mail in Gmail and then save it in the draft or send an email to myself to share my documents and notes between my home and office computers.

With Google Calendar under beta testing I think Google is going to roll out lot of features with this merge. Some of them could include the integration of Writely with Gmail for composing and the ability to open & store attached word documents in Gmail with Writely and the possibilities could be endless. So as a user of both Writely and Gmail I am very much happy about the merge and I am looking for some cool features in the future. It’s just a matter of time before they buy or develop the online Spreadsheet like NumSum and integrate it with Google Calendar and Writely to provide a full fledged online Office suite, the dreadful Microsoft Office killer.

But this doesn’t stop me from being skeptical about the possible privacy issues. I some how get a feeling that people have started to believe Google too much. But whether Google is keeping the belief is a different story. For instance right now Google know who are my friends (Orkut), my email correspondence (Gmail), my conversations with others (Google Talk), the web pages I search for (Search History), the feeds that I read (Google Reader) and now all my documents (Writely). Will Google keep up their motto “Don’t do evil”? I don’t know, but let’s hope they keep it up.

Links

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments