Google Gadgets Ratchets Up Apps Competition With Microsoft
Google’s are free – MS’s aren’t, and that ought to say a lot :)
Thank you to Elinor Mills at the News Blog;
Google on Wednesday unveiled Gadgets for Spreadsheets in Google Docs, allowing people to create graphical representations of data in spreadsheets and publish them on Web sites.
[Google Docs lets you turn your data into a Motion Chart in a spreadsheet via a Google Gadget. (Credit: Google)]
For consumers, this means they have a dozen or so new ways to look at data in their spreadsheets. Google has put up a gallery of specialty gadgets to choose from. They include gadgets to display data on a pie chart, map, time chart, funnel chart, Gantt chart, pivot table, and on a heat map if it’s geographical data. You can even create interactive charts like those used by Google Finance and for motion charts.
Which is all good stuff – right? It is interesting to me…
What becomes more interesting, as always, is the ending comment to the article;
“With the enhancements, Google is ratcheting up the competition its free Web-hosted apps are giving Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, which companies pay for.”
When you’re the top dog, you can allow yourself a lot of leeway with the manner in which you conduct yourself and your business. Sometimes you can even thumb your nose at your competition :)
