Category Archives: Google

Rich Internet Applications

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Microsoft’s “Silverlight” announcement a few days ago has gotten a lot of positive early attention (see here and here and especially here for examples) and focused attention on the category of Rich Internet Applications. The Mono folks have announced that they’re going to do a Linux version, tentatively codenamed “Moonlight.” OpenLazlo, a pioneer RIA, has been discussed as a Google acquisition target, if AJAX and the persistence engine planned for Firefox 3.0 aren’t enough. And Silverlight, uh, overshadowed Adobe’s recent Flex announcement.

All the initial reports suggest that Microsoft, presumably under the watchful eye of Ray Ozzie, got this one right; it’s fast, small, beautiful, and reclaims space for Microsoft on the desktop. Can Office on Silverlight be far behind?

I’ve used the New York Times Reader (free trial, $15/mo., included with paper subscription) which is based on Silverlight and it is a great experience. You don’t need to be online to use it; in fact, it sort of blurs the distinction between being on and off line to the extent that you don’t really care so much. And it has rich controls for viewing, much better, because it’s customized for reading a newspaper, than a plain old browser, even with all the cool Javascript and prefetching tricks.

Lazlo claims some corporate customers, but from what I’ve seen Rich Internet Applications are in their infancy in the enterprise. Silverlight’s got an advantage there, of course, because of all the armies of VB and .Net developers who now have another tool at their disposal; it will be interesting to see what they build.

Google Spreadsheets

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So Bob Hull, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Web 2.0, sends out this email today to a couple of other spreadsheet nerds in my practice:

Hey,

Been trying out the web-based shared spreadsheet beta at google. I’m not sure how fully compatible it is with .XLS formats, but it is a great tool for collaborating remotely (e.g., when Nadine and I were working on the [client] business cases, which weren’t full of advanced functions, it would have helped a lot).

If you haven’t tried – do

I’m sure there are some security issues – although it is PW protected.

The specific case he refers to is illustrative in a couple of ways. We were working on a Linux migration strategy a big Novell customer, including doing financial analysis of several scenarios (e.g., Oracle/Solaris -> Oracle RAC/Linux, Windows -> virtualized Windows on VMWare or XEN). So that’s cool and everything. But we were also working in different locations (Bob’s wife was hospitalized during the project, so he had to leave to care for her, but he foolishly kept working remotely) and with terrible collaboration tools. It was really a case of the slow boat in the convoy determining the speed for everyone.

On that project, as Bob indicates, we really could have used Google’s spreadsheet, or one of the alternatives that are out there.

And, by the way, I’ve been testing it and it seems to import .xls files – as long as they’re fairly simple – with no problem at all. So you can’t bring in a multi-tabbed pivot table rich charting dashboard, but the single tab discounted cash flow analysis comes across fine. And you could reasonably argue that doing DCF is what a spreadsheet ought to be doing, not running your company.

So what?

The product itself is interesting, in that it’s a viable alternative right off the bat to Excel and OpenOffice. But, as I’ve said before about Writely (which Google has subsequently acquired, so they have a word processor and a spreadsheet and check out S5 for presentations), these web based office tools have built-in advantages. Bob highlighted the collaboration aspect, but there are others. For me, foremost among them is format. I don’t know how long .doc is going to be around, but I can bet you that .html is more viable.

Google’s spreadsheet is the first good way I’ve seen to go from .xls to .html, which is not trivial. A lot of spreadsheets, including at Novell, get mailed around principally as presentation layers; columns and rows of numbers. You can do this in HTML, of course, but that’s not in the toolkit for most Excel users. There’s an Export to HTML option in Excel (which is generally very good about importing and exporting), but it generates ‘orribly non-standard HTML. So if I want to generate a web page from my Excel spreadsheet so that I can share it with my team mates, currently the best option that I know of is Google Spreadsheets. Or maybe MS Sharepoint.

Also, if Google plays their hand correctly, it will get better quickly on the basis of the community around it. Do you need a function to convert pre-July 11, 1998 Thai bhat to dollars? Maybe someone had that itch once and scratched it and released it into the wild so not only are there the Excel functions from Microsoft (=sum(b1:b15)) but also (=oldbhat(value, target_currency)).

Google spreadsheet as AJAX mashup for Everyman

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On 6 June, Jon Bultmeyer, on the topic of Goggle’s spreadsheet, said:

…imagine you migrate your spreadsheets into the Google cloud because you want to share them live, which creates demand for others to have gmail accounts.” Now once you have the spreadsheet there, imagine formulas that want to keep your content there like

=search($A$1)

=rss(“http://foo.com/bar.xml”)

=flickr(“http://flickr/tag/foss”)

=webservice(“http://salesforce.com/mycustomers”, “custid”, $A$1)

=video(…)

=map(geocode($A$1))

in other words, formulas don’t have to live in within your machine, they can be resolved in the cloud. So is this the Everyman’s application- as-potential-AJAX-mashup-platform?

I think this is right on; I’m not sure if he’s joking about the Excel spreadsheet formula syntax, but that’s what people understand.

I have a very specific use case in mind for Enterprise Web 2.0, which consists of a business analyst mailing around spreadsheets and I’m sure it’s consistent from company to company. It would be fantastically useful for them to be able to call external services using something simple and familiar like Excel formulas. A lot of times, people use Excel *just* for presentation, which is absurd, of course, but they know how to do it.