Google Drive launching third-party add-ons program for Docs, Sheets | Hacker News Reader

Google Drive launching third-party add-ons program for Docs, Sheets

zdnet.com

52 pointscmulligan11 comments

This doesn't smell like a core component in Google's long term strategy. It's a great idea for Google's users but not really for their important customers [advertisers]. While there is certainly money to be made, a startup would be at the mercy of Google's whims and changes to product direction.

I'd gauge Google's ambivalence of commitment by the fact that seven years ago this sort of model could have been implemented. But it wasn't and there isn't some new technology that is driving it now nor is there a red blooded eeffort behind it. Avery has been providing label printing support for word processor software at least since DOS versions of WordPerfect.

If you believe ChromeOS is part of their long term strategy, you have to believe this is. Add-ons for sheets can potentially make sheets truly feature complete compared to excel, which is THE biggest argument against ChromeOS/Windows parity by the average user.

We're nearly five years on with ChromeOS and it's barely a blip in the market. The reason is that latency is deadly and if all that's going on is web browsing and media consumption a slate with touchscreen is more attractive than a clamshell with keyboard.

Google's spreadsheet implementation is pretty much like every other alternative to Excel. It implements some fraction of the things which are easy. This makes it good enough and development stalls and people for whom spreadsheets really matter stick with Excel. Microsoft is often accused of missing trends, but spreadsheets are not one of them. Excel is the killer app that drives Windows sales for corporate desktop systems.

There's a reason it remains uncontested even by Google. Doing what Microsoft does with Excel is really hard...or at least the hard parts are.

I'm not completely disagreeing with you - but I'm also not agreeing with you. When I look at the way my company has adopted Google Sheets, I think Microsoft might have more trouble on their hands. While certainly there are hardcore spreadsheet tasks that only Excel can do, I find that most common business tasks that people use spreadsheets for (e.g. present a budget) are more than well supported by Google. Now, this is not to say that this translates to user adoption - I have no idea if they are actually displacing Excel users, but I do think they are aiming for the fat part of the bat.

I agree that Google's spreadsheet is good enough for most people. My point is that good enough for most people appears to be good enough for Google, and that's why it won't replace Excel in many organizations.

The reason Excel is the killer app for corporate sales is that it is attractive to influencers (to borrow the term from social media). There are people on the executive floor who use Excel and often quite well. That's where the decision comes from. They don't want to fool with finagling their subordinates' TCP reports out of Scheme in a Grid, or Libre or Docs to crunch the numbers.

The power of Excel to drive top down decisions is why WordPerfect disappeared. Secretaries didn't choose Word. Their boss bought office because she wanted Excel and Word was part of the deal.

The fat part of the bat for Google is free as in hog pens and slop troughs. And that's the basis upon which they allocate resources. The development of Docs is so glacial that just about any expansion of the ecosystem is news. Even a whopping 50 developers.

The best add-on I've seen internally is one that can format/color code snippets in your doc, great for engineers.

when do you typically have code in a google doc?

Design docs, specifically if you're discussing an API or a code generator.

Interesting strategy to compete with the not so well known add-ons for MS office. I actually forgot Office had them until I saw this post about GDocs. Here is an example, Avery Templates for Word http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/store/avery-templates-app...

Did they provide a sufficiently rich API to make add in for equivalent functionality on Android devices? Is there even a business productivity strategy for Drive apps on Android? Bleck.

For the same thing I am searching from long time

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