Google Spreadsheets Taste Test

After one look a Google Spreadsheets I'm certain that Microsoft has nothing to fear. I can't imagine a single "Information Worker" or organization switching to this. I remember when Google used to be a company where their Betas were knock-your-socks-off-unbelievable. Gmail. Maps. News. These things all pushed their entire respective fields ahead by an order of magnitude. Google Spreadsheets are anything but impressive. Simple Excel operations (and I mean something as basic as adding rows to the bottom of the sheet) are cumbersome. Spreadsheets of any complexity won't import. There's no graphing capability. I don't even think you can print.

The other thing that this makes readily apparent is that Office has been under development for over a decade. No one is going to replicate that feature set, that much code, over night. Even if most Excel users only use 5% of it's features, that 5% is still a tremendous amount of code. Good luck.

It seems that the main feature of the Google Spreadsheets is that "You can share them!!!" Big whup. Call me old fashioned, but I call that "E-mail". Most spreadsheets are single-master, many-reader. I don't usually need everyone on earth to be able to update it. Assuming that I do need multiple writers, Sharepoint fills this niche quite nicely.

Maybe Google should stop debuting these things as Beta. A Google Beta used to suggest a higher level of functionality and usefulness. Alpha anyone?