Real Competition Begins
As anticipated, Google released its own spreadsheet. Our target is to do a web spreadsheet better than Google. Google’s size and innovative workforce allows it to do and excel in many things. While we at EditGrid put in all our passion and innovation here, the real competition is about to begin.
Hi, Microsoft, when will you join the party as well?
June 7th, 2006 at 1:22 am
Good luck. You might just need it!
June 7th, 2006 at 1:39 am
Good luck. As I see it your best innovation is the live data streaming to any cell.. you should develop that in a major way, as I see it it’s a killer feature. Who knows, do it well enough and GOOG might bring you on board.
I’m thinking make a range of default cell variables which will auto-updated the spreadsheet. You’ve got stock, now do currencies, derivatives, everything. Finance people must love that. Plug your security and a pay version so there’s no adds. That’s got to be a good idea.
But mainly .. good luck! You’ve got to have some guts to start such a niche business, but I hope you can do it.
June 7th, 2006 at 2:09 am
Thanks, Sho. What you mentioned is exactly one of our vision - live data!
June 7th, 2006 at 3:10 am
How about building an ajax widget version that can be added into a web page blog etc… similar to adsense fused with netvibes. That woul;d allow you to compete unfairly with Google by using viral means.
PS I’m interested in the live feature, could i reach into a cell in another spreadsheet and have that live linked?
Also a good idea would be to be able to offer this outside of your domain and reach into any html table and pluck out cells (even if its just a regular html table).
e.g. http://www.anotherdomain.com/mypage.html#tableid?cell=C1R3
feel free to talk to me about it I have some real reasons for this and some interesting use cases that would work with stuff we are working on as well as possibly others.
regards
Al
June 7th, 2006 at 3:41 am
PS (I wrote about this back in march prior to discovering EditGrid)
http://www.folknology.com/blog/1/1/2006/3/7/57
If you are interested
regards
Al
June 7th, 2006 at 4:03 am
Hi, Al, thanks for your posts.
- Re: Post to Blog. It will be in our next release. We’ve done alot to make it good before we release it.
- Re: Live data. You will be later on be able to get life data through some EditGrid unique functions and cross book reference.
- We are building an API to allow access of EditGrid’s data so as to facilitate building applications around us. We’ve a similar idea which we call it deep permalink.
- I’ll read your blog and further email you. We’d love to have your input when we are development the API and future features.
- We’re inspired by this article alot, let me share with you here: http://www.itworld.com/App/921/nls_ebiz_onlinespreadsheet_060404/index.html
June 7th, 2006 at 4:17 am
Excellent article, I agree with the principles Sean McGrath expresses.
Even though he talks about using a hypothetical WCML, I and others have been thinking along the lines of using a microformat based on an xhtml subset around tables. I have some documentation thats was being prepared along these lines which I could share with you.
One of the benefits of using a micrformat based around tables is the backward compatability meaning you can reference (in a web resource sense) any tabular data that current exists on the web.
Also it is important to see it bidirectionally as well, not just outsiders accessing your data but also the other way around, kind of share and share alike, real collaborative distribution.
regards
Al
June 7th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
You’re right, the real competition is just began. Stay firm for your own believe on technological excellence can drive EditGrid good enough to compete with Google, and have the gut to face the upcoming challenges.
Cheers,
Cliff
June 8th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
不好意思，我想知道是否可以对格子进行合并？
另，建议在操作体验上多改进，感觉上用google的更好。
June 8th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
真的很对不起呀，关于格子合并，我们还在努力中。我们希望在造这个功能之余，仍能保持现时界面的速度，所以会花多一点时间，但相信会在月内完成。
操作体验方面，能提供一点具体建议吗？我们实在很需要大家的意见，也会努力实现的！
June 9th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
I added an update :
http://www.folknology.com/blog/1/1/2006/6/9/1036
and linked in the Microform files :
http://www.folknology.com/onlinespreadsheets/
PS looks like Dave is thinking along similar lines, I you can get his support you’l be rocking…
http://scripting.wordpress.com/2006/06/07/scripting-news-for-682006/
regards
Al
June 9th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
Forget it. You’ll a goner.
And this goes to all spreadsheet websites.
You can’t beat Google and MSN.
If there is any among the small startups that stand a chance. it’s definitely not Editgrid. It’s Zoho Sheet.
Numsum, edit grid, irows. bla.
June 10th, 2006 at 2:06 am
I have to disagree with forward looker, at least about Zoho Sheet being better. Zoho doesn’t support real time updates as far as I can tell. That is a deal breaker for online data sharing IMO.
June 10th, 2006 at 6:54 am
At least they support CHARTS and is WAY better looking than the others.
June 12th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Wow, we’ve got a little debate here. Thanks so much to both forward looker and Atul.
Re: You’ll be a goner.
Google’s joining make the competition environment tougher, but it also makes a bigger market. If the market is big enough, there will be enough room for a few players. TnC is a startup, but we’re not too new. We’re here 3 years ago. We learnt how to survive already. Our event software business has breakeven and we’ve funding to support the development of EditGrid. So, It may be a bit early to evaluate.
Re: Charts.
We fully appreciate Zoho Sheet and also iRows capability in generating Charts. But this is only one of the many features that are required for a spreadsheet. May be different web spreadsheets has different crowd of users which drive different priorities of features. It just happens that we’ll add the chart features later. Chart is relatively easy to implement so this could not be a differentiating feature. Probably Google can add it overnight.
July 12th, 2006 at 1:37 am
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/505311/an/0/page/0#505311
August 11th, 2006 at 3:59 am
I think you are so far the best by far!