Googling Google

Last week, the news that Google had released a spreadsheet burst out all over the news, prompting visions of Google boxing toe-to-toe with Microsoft. Some ill-informed commentators seemed to think that Google was making an Excel replacement available—and connect this with the fact that Google now owns Writely, a web-base word processor of a kind. Such commentators ought to do more research.

This is the phony war. Writely will not replace Word, nor will Google Spreadsheets replace Excel for anyone that uses either piece of software extensively. I tried Google Spreadsheets. Until it has some graphics capability it will not replace my particular use of Excel. When it does it will—but all I use Excel for is simple tables with totals and graphs. Writely is good enough for simple documents too.

Anyway that's not the point. Writely and the new Google Spreadsheets are true web-based collaborative applications. They are superior to Word and Excel when it comes to collaborating on a document. They have their own legitimacy and will displace some usage of Excel and Word. Enough said.

As I was messing about with Google Spreadsheets, I scanned the web to see which companies Google was really competing with. There are other web-based spreadsheets; Zoho, Num Sum, QuickBase (from Intuit) and Worksheet-Server, for example. Some are free and some are not. Zoho is more advanced than Google Spreadsheets at the moment (it does graphics) but it doesn't have the power of the Google brand behind it, so it's probably toast. One spreadsheet that might not be though, despite either Microsoft or Google, comes from the father of the Spreadsheet himself, Dan Bricklin. He's got an alpha product out there called wikiCalc, which is part Wiki and part Spreadsheet. I never got time to play with it this week, but I will. Looks interesting.

I later focused on trying to understand what Google has actually got. The point is that I don't yet understand why some people think that Google is going to displace Microsoft. So I decided to become a Google customer for anything they offer that I might be able to use. Finding out what Google offers is no simple task. Google doesn't actually have a page you can go to to find out everything it does. The Google Products page (click “more” at the top of the Google page) plus Google Labs will give you most of it, but I'm not sure it gets you everything there is.

I ended up with a set of organized links to Google Trends, Search History, Alerts, Base (good for recipes), Home Page (make your own Google home page), Notebook, News, Maps, Directory, Spreadsheets, Gmail, Calendar, Writely and Groups. This took me all day (but cost nothing of course). At the same time I upgraded Firefox and downloaded a Google Sync capability that keeps browsers on different machines in step. This is an awful lot of Google capability, but I could live without most of it.

In doing all this I ran into 2 neat “front-end capabilities” for Google. I can recommend them both:

One for the search engine itself at http://www.usabilityviews.com/simply_google.htm. and as it happens, just about any search you can make using Google. The other is quite awesome, if you've ever searched for an image on Google. You'll find it at http://elzr.com/imagery/.

After all that time spent Googling Google, I concluded that for quite a while yet, Microsoft will not catch Google's extensive search capability and that Google is not going to cause people to abandon Microsoft. Linux might, Apple might, Google won't.

Oracle Shudders

Oracle seems to be fighting and slowly losing a battle with Open Source databases. Some of this has to do with whether Open Source databases are credible. As it happens they are, but that doesn't mean organizations are happy to use them yet. But that tide seems to be turning. Enterprise DB, an Open Source database company, recently funded a survey (the 2006 Open Source Impressions Survey) of 12000+ Java developers to get some facts about take-up attitudes.

More than half the survey respondents indicated that their respective companies had either already deployed an open source database or were more likely to deploy an open source database than any other open source application, including CRM, desktop productivity, and ERP. In other words, Database is next on the list for a reduction in license fees.

Oracle has, you may have noticed, been taking arms against a sea of Open Source troubles, by buying up MySQL's partner Innobase and offering a cut down version of Oracle for free in small implementations. This may well have blunted MySQL's pencil, but it hasn't stopped its momentum in any big way. But as it happens, MySQL is probably not the threat.

It is Enterprise DB that is turning into Oracle's real Open Source nemesis. Oracle must have shuddered like a minor earthquake in March, when Sony chose to migrate away from Oracle to Enterprise DB as the foundation for its online games web site. This is no rinky-dink database application here. Sony stores terabytes of data to support its games and deploys over 150 Oracle 9i databases in the process. But not for long. According to Sony, 80 to 90% of its applications can run on Enterprise DB without modification. And they will be migrated accordingly, as Sony cuts its database costs by—errr —sources close to the deal are suggesting 80%.

Enterprise DB couldn't have a better poster child to launch a frontal assault on Oracle than Sony. If one of the largest corporations in the world chooses Enterprise DB for its largest database application then its time to start talking tough in those Oracle license negotiations. Why wouldn't you invite Enterprise DB in?