Google Presentations

Starting today, Google Presentations which will permit a slimmed down version of PowerPoint to be available on the web, with fairly rudimentary editing functionality. It permits loading files of up to 10MB from PPT, though I found some cutting off happened of images and all animation appears to have gone.

The empire is growing all the time. And the Economist article illustrated above captures that precisely, as well as the clouds on the horizon.

Google Presentation just another ‘Docs’ feature

“I think a lot of traditional office tools were built on the notion of individual productivity — you built tools that were there to make one person on one PC very productive. What’s missing is team productivity — the ability to make it so that people working on things together can quickly publish and share information with coworkers or others outside the company or friends. Thats where this adds to it,” Sheth said.

In fact, “traditional office tools” as Sheth calls them (aka Office) only cover one fourth of what Google considers must have functionality: document creation. The other three fourths — collaboration, document publishing and retrieval (aka search) aren’t part of the traditional Office suite, but are central to Google’s vision.

“A lot of traditional office applications grew up in a world before the Internet was widely available. (Google) Apps have grown up in a world that’s based on the Internet. Because of that, the paradigms of how people work together are very different and things grow in different directions,” he said.