Google's entry into the space gives online presentation tools much more credibility and that can only help Zenter. It's true that many users that would have used Zenter will now use Google Presentations, but now the pool of people using any online presentations tool will be much greater. So it's not a zero-sum game by any means.
Also, Google has announced that it will be released "soon" which will give Zenter plenty of motivation to beat them to the punch and launch their product.
PR, if handled right, can also help Zenter. If they are positioned in the media as the underdog with a real chance of taking on the Giant. Hopefully this will play out differently than Kiko. It all depends on how good Zenter is comparatively. Kiko didn't have much of a chance compared to Google Calendar.
I'm curious to see if Zenter will wait to release until after Google Presentations, or if they will release before. There will be the temptation to launch after GPres in order to one-up-them in features before they launch. But if they do that they will lose much of the great PR that they could get if they launched theirs first and started developing a strong initial user community.
Ask yourself, would you be more likely to blog about Zenter if they launched before GPres, or after. For me it would definitely be before. Hopefully they will consider the lesson that Odeo learned from launching right after iTunes did. Odeo has it's own problems, but it certainly destroyed their PR strategy when they missed their launch window.
Just give us a taste of Zenter and we'll be hooked.
I suspect Google is trying to do the same thing they did with GMail, which was to rethink what people wanted in email and then get to the root of why they wanted it rather than slavishly giving users what they asked for (for example, folders and filters and crap being replaced by search that's fast and works) and the traditional view being replaced by a threaded view...in both cases, it simplified the interface by removing the elements that were there for the convenience of the developer rather than the user. In the case of presentations, sure PowerPoint is bloated and stupid, but people still want their presentations to look good.
Now, of course, it's possible that Zenter will get side-tracked by some of the incredibly clever bits (and there are some scarily clever bits in there) and forget to launch before five other worthy competitors enter the field. But if they get out there first (Zoho Show doesn't count...it blows), they'll do great.
Remember, Google is best at making what its own hackers use. That's why Gmail turned out good and Google Video turned out bad. Hackers use calendars, but they don't like to give slide presentations.
Nevertheless, even if we assume that this is true, many of Google's employees, including tech leads, produt managers, VPs, do give slide presentations. These employees have huge influence on the products and thus its very likely that Google "Presenations" will be more like Gmail than Google Video.
First we made Paul into Chuck Norris, and now he's a Prophet. This news.yc was a good move for him.