Google Presentations

No, I don’t mean go to Google and search for presentations, Google has announced they are working on a presentations program for their online suite, Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The bought Tonic Systems for their presentation creation and document conversion technologies, they expect to release it this summer.

First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

We’ve already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats. Source: We’re expecting

Techcrunch says they expect it to become part of a big offering of free software for small businesses.

There?s no need for further speculation: Today at the Web 2.0 Expo Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed (here also) that Google will soon launch a PowerPoint clone, completing their basic office suite (they already have Word and Excel covered). Expect these services to be combines with Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk and other services under a single brand for small businesses. Source: Google?s Office Suite Complete: Google ?PowerPoint? Confirmed

Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb had one of the first posts on it from the Web 2.0 Expo, about the Eric Schmidt interview which contained the announcement.

Schmidt starts off by announcing a presentation feature for Docs & Spreadsheets. John Battelle points out that this completes the Office suite, so he asks is it now a competitor to MS? Schmidt says no, because it doesn’t have the same or all of MS Office’s functionality. He says Google D&S is a collaborative, web 2.0 framework - very different to MS Office according to Schmidt. He talks about the transition to a web-based computing framework, which their product is a good example of (for R/WW readers, aka the Web Office!). John persists - nevertheless it is a competitor to MS, he says (to crowd applause). Schmidt persists with his line of not answering that question, saying that D&S will enable people to use productivity products on the web, which he says they will use for different reasons - such as sharing and collaborative features. Schmidt calls this a web 2.0 shift in thinking for productivity. Source: Web 2.0 Expo: Eric Schmidt Interview

Eventually, Google will be like one big convenience store, where you can get a free generic version of anything you want, just make sure you click on the occasional ad while you are there…..

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