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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I agree. A small number of sophisticated users really use Excel in something close to its potential, but most people I know use spreadsheets for simple lists and maybe adding up a column of numbers. If Google start chasing Excel on features, they could find themselves on the losing side of a "fire and motion"[1] strategy.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

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Yeah, I use the Spreadsheet app the most. It's quicker to download all the Javascript required to run it than it is to boot Excel off my hard drive, and I just use it for groceries and things.

It might be the perception thing. OWA looks more 'professional' than GMail for example, although the latter probably has more capabilities and obviously isn't tied to Exchange.

I'm guessing this version of Office will be extremely flashy, and Google Docs will look like a 90s edition of WordPerfect by comparison.

This makes a lot of sense strategically- as an excel power user it's hard to imagine google docs really ever catching up with excel, but that's not how most people use office. Excel really is a fantastic product, and when used with the excellent analytics plug-in is so awesome for analyzing web analytics & SEO data that it actually makes me glad to be running windows (and I'm not sure I could ever move entirely to Mac/Linux because of how developed these specific niche products are on windows). Although google clearly could build something of this quality for web analytics data mining, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction, and making the GA interface less powerful (for reasons which are understandable albeit not really admirable)

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