Google Office

Ryan Christensen - October 4th, 2005 at 11:02 am PDT

My sentiments exactly.. I’m still watching, and it’s pretty depressing. (It also reminds me how Scott McNealy *really* needs to work on his presentation skills — there seems to have been the potential to make this at least *slightly* more interesting.. but he really made the announcement anti-climactic.)

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40 - October 4th, 2005 at 11:02 am PDT

another missed opportunity from google.

first Google Talk, then Video, and now this. C’mon gang, this isn’t news.

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Justin Lilly - October 4th, 2005 at 11:10 am PDT

There may be a bug with your rss feed. this post showed up as [Untitled]. regardless, thanks for giving me the news. I was hoping for some gOO (google open office) v. Microsoft action, if for no other reason than to hear what the traditional media had to say about it.

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Michael Arrington (@arrington) - October 4th, 2005 at 12:26 pm PDT

I’m just angry that we spent so much time on this non-news event. Seems like people generally agree.

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Tracey - October 4th, 2005 at 12:31 pm PDT

This overhyped speculation of future Google products, services and applications around the blogosphere and getting out of hand.

I really didn’t see the impact of the Google Desktop search when it was initially announced.

I am missing something?

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Dalibor - October 4th, 2005 at 12:34 pm PDT

I’ve seen that coming. No web office suite yet. The reason is clear. It’s about smart marketing which shuold generate demand. Demand for Google Office ( ajaxed ). We still need to come that way in terms of user awareness. Of course, some time in the future the concept of Google word processing will come out with storage and some fancy stuff

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Marcus - October 4th, 2005 at 1:21 pm PDT

This was what I got from it:
“Hey everybody! We’re going to bundle our lame toolbar into Javas JRE!!! aren’t you all happy for us!!”

The press: “So… is there anything else? I mean are you going to put openoffice in a browser or like… make some cool new Java thing?”

Google/Sun - “No, don’t you see how cool this is!! the JRE comes with the lame toolbar!! the JRE is downloaded 20 million times a month, that means a lot of people will have the lame toolbar!!”

What a waste.

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Bob Aman - October 4th, 2005 at 1:26 pm PDT

Frankly, this announcement was exactly what I expected. I was counting on it being approximately equivalent to Google announcing that they really liked Firefox a lot.

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macewan - October 4th, 2005 at 2:31 pm PDT

I watched about 20 minutes of Scott & his Sun infomercial. Quite disappointing - huge waste of time.

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Alex - October 4th, 2005 at 2:34 pm PDT

Who said there was going to be anything interesting? Google announced a joint press conference with Sun, and they delivered a joint press conference with Sun. The fact that people had all the expectations up is not their fault.

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shane - October 4th, 2005 at 2:54 pm PDT

The links did work eventually. I watched it and it was kind of disappointing. there were a few tasty tidbits. Check out http://www.supergeekblog.com for in depth coverage of the webcast.

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Jeof - October 4th, 2005 at 2:56 pm PDT

Agree with Alex - the web2 community got ourselves all hyped up … Google didn’t do it to us. On the heels of a dozen AJAX office-esque apps and the rumors of a Google calendar (since calendar.google.com seems to be a working subdomain while office.google.com is not), we kind of jumped the gun on our expectations. Partnering with Sun to pat each other on the back is merely the forefunner. MS Office wasn’t developed in a day (or maybe it was … dang it that’s why its messed up!), we can’t expect more of Google just because they know what they’re doing - they’re pattern is to release a little bit at a time, and they’ve released a lot lately. give ‘em time.

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freeb0rn - October 4th, 2005 at 3:03 pm PDT

This served to do exactly what Sun and Google wanted. They tested the waters to see just how far they could string people along with so little. So little information was released yet it generated enormous hype–and it seems to grow with every “project” Google unveils. I think if we give it a few more months–possibly a year–we’ll definitely see something substantial come out of this joint venture.

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Michael Arrington (@arrington) - October 4th, 2005 at 3:44 pm PDT

Alex, I think this story could have been handled with a press release. The fact that they scheduled a webcast with the two CEOs suggested that there was, in fact, something interesting to tell us. That’s the main reason I think Google “got” us on this one.

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macewan - October 4th, 2005 at 5:55 pm PDT

http://www.macewan.org/wp-cont.....reamin.png

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Michael Arrington (@arrington) - October 4th, 2005 at 6:38 pm PDT

nice.

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Mike Splain - October 4th, 2005 at 8:00 pm PDT

haha yeah, google definately got us again. Everyone knows they love playing these games, it just draws up hype for their products. Most of us saw one of the first major times they did it, gmail on april fools. That wasn’t a mistake that they released it on that day, it just caused more of a talk. Same went when the made google talk, opened the server and domain a day before it was released, knowing people would find it. Google loves playing games, and i’m sure they’ll get us again like this many times in the future.

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Alex - October 4th, 2005 at 8:10 pm PDT

Michael (#15) - it looks to me like the whole thing was pushed by Sun. Like a high school girl who can never get dates always dreams of hanging out with football team captain, Sun is there announcing this *huge deal* in Mountain View, waving and screaming “Look at us, we’re not as irrelevant as you thought”.

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Mike - October 4th, 2005 at 9:49 pm PDT

Can we say Google hype?

I think there is far too much of it and Google is definitely trying to feed it. However, I hope this will help people pay a little less attention the next time the rumour mill and noise starts to come out.

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Razvan Antonescu - October 4th, 2005 at 11:13 pm PDT

And that god damn toolbar is not compatible with FF beta. I mean most of their products are in beta but they don’t make it compatible with others. Quite lame

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Dav - October 5th, 2005 at 8:13 am PDT

McNealy’s speaking style is category windbag, for sure. His funniest line though was something along the lines of:

McNealy: Google has great employees …a lot of them used to work for us!
Schmidt: You promised you wouldn’t talk about that.
McNealy: Well I did.

(p.s Macewan, high larious)

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Bryan - October 5th, 2005 at 10:34 am PDT

They’ve come to the point.. just like Microsoft… that we expect too much out of them and very little will wow us now. It was inevitable, but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. That’s what happens when you have so many teams burried within a population of 3000+ Googlites and nobody from the real world to bash them on the head with the reality bat.

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