Nielson//NetRatings released a report (PDF) on 20th February which concluded that Google Docs & Spreadsheets has dominated the online productivity tool market. According to the report, Google D&S attracted 445,762 unique visitors in October 2006, which amounts to 92% of unique visitors in the market. The remaining 8% market share is shared by other players in the market, EditGrid included. The news was quickly picked up by the blogosphere at large on the eve of the official announcement of Google Apps + Google D&S integration and its subsequent spins.

Our internal statistics, however, paint a rather different picture. As you can see in the following chart…

… EditGrid was visited by 56,944 — 70,092 unique visitors over the same period, amounting to around 1/6 of Google D&S’s figure in December 2006. That alone makes up 14% of a market comprising only EditGrid and Google D&S — and needless to say there are a few more out there. Furthermore, while Google D&S’s market share has largely flattened out, EditGrid’s market share has been on the rise in 2006 Q4. It’s also of note that EditGrid’s trend of growth in December 2006 was in fact cut short by the Taiwan earthquake aftermaths.

Other stats show that we do lose out to Google D&S on average visit duration. EditGrid’s 2006 average…

… of 586 s (or roughly 9.76 min) per visit falls slightly behind Google D&S’s October 2006 figure at 10 minutes. Having said that, both figures are still far from impressive — an average productivity tool user would stay on the application for far longer than 10 or even 20 minutes. This is something that both Google D&S and EditGrid will have to work on.

I’m not suggesting that the Nielson//NetRatings figures are unreliable — the two sets of statistics may be compiled on different basis that makes it difficult to compare likes with likes and, after all, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics — but am merely providing some perspective on this piece of news. It is good news to the whole market that online productivity applications are gaining traction. It is, however, pre-mature to jump to the conclusion that Google D&S is the undisputed champion in a sure and settled contest. It’s still early stage and everyone is playing catch up to the desktop giant(s). The race is on — and wide open.

In this spirit we are making available more stats from EditGrid for public inspection. In a typical “eat our dogfood” move I’ve compiled selected statistics onto an online spreadsheet (some of which courtesy of Alexa and Quantcast). I hereby call for our partners and competitors in this field to do the same and publish comparable statistics. Google D&S’s statistics, if available, may still dwarf our statistics combined — yet I’m confident that the competition is nowhere near as one-sided as has been depicted elsewhere.

And, lastly… a belated Kung Hei Fat Choy to you all!

Update (2007-03-02): Ismael Ghalimi of IT|Redux apparently got my message and published comparable statistics from the ThinkFree and Zoho online office suites. These re-enforced our message — the market is still wide open and up for grabs.

More Update (2007-03-06): With kind permission from Ismael I’ve updated the statistics comparison spreadsheet to include the ThinkFree and Zoho figures.

February 2007 Update 3 (rev 6973)

• Aligned API upload file size limit with main site’s
• Optimisation in remote data web fetch: execute EditGrid web fetch separate from non-EditGrid web fetch

February 2007 Update 2 (rev 6967)

• [#6389] Cookie disabled warning on sign-up page
• [#6397] Fixed focus in copy-to-clipboard toolbox
• Remote data web fetch regression

We have another piece of exciting news to share right after our out-of-beta announcement — EditGrid is now empowering the collaborative spreadsheet feature of Central Desktop. This is a right partnership deal for us at the moment as it pits two like-minded web application service start-up together. The integrated product will form a compelling offering in the web-based collaboration space. The official announcement is released on Central Desktop’s blog. The news is promptly picked up by ZDNet, Read/Write Web, StartupSquad and a few others.

The partnership is a realisation of our strategy as laid down in our previous posts here. By focusing and making good the online spreadsheet technology, we are also positioning ourselves as the online spreadsheet technology provider, with the right ingredients that complete and complement our partners’ and/or customers’ product offerings to different market segments.

Partners, customers and users are the biggest driving force of EditGrid’s innovation. Keep innovating. Keep innovating is our strategy to compete.

Congratulations to Central Desktop for launching the integration. It’s fun working with Isaac and Arnulf.

February 2007 Update 1 (rev 6958)

• [#6381] URL parameter ?nocache=1 to force reload
• [#6382] Sign-up page wordings clarification

Happy St. Valentine’s Day! Today we are proud to present EditGrid February 2007 Release — the first release without the “Beta” tag, signifying that EditGrid is now official out-of-beta.

Having run through 1 year of development and 9 months of public beta with 18 beta releases, it gives me immense joy and excitement to look behind at what we have achieved — as well as much to look forward to in the now officially and fully launched EditGrid.

Our major achievements in the last year include:

• Over 15,000 registered personal users, from 30+ countries.
• Over 200 trial organisations and 4,500 trial organisation users.
• Over 23,000 spreadsheets, among which 10,000+ are public spreadsheets.
• Translated into 9 languages by users through EditGrid Localisation Project.
• Over 1,000 blog mentions and 1,400 del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Covered in Webware, NetworkWorld, About.com, AccMan, Wangtam, etc.
• Available at Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google Personalized Homepage.
• Integrated with Salesforce.com. More partnerships and integrations to be announced soon.

We’ll keep our service to personal users free-of-charge. Organisations can now subscribe to our subscription services for added security, administration and customisation features. We offer a simple and affordable pricing at US$5 per user per month, and academic and non-profit-making organisations will enjoy a 50% discount.

In 2007, we want to do a lot more. We will keep the current development pace and responsiveness to user feedback - continuing to ship the best technology to our partners and the best service to our users.

February 2007 Release (rev 6933)

On St. Valentine’s Day 2007 the EditGrid Team presents February 2007 Release — the first release without the “Beta” tag, signifying that EditGrid is now official out-of-beta.

Celebrating the first full release post beta are the following notable new features:

• [#5932] EditGrid Subscription Service, now officially rolled out.
• [#6203] Raised spreadsheet upload limit to 2MB, or 60,000 cells, per spreadsheet. More to come in subsequent releases.
• Overhauled caching mechanism.

New subscription features and patches rolled out in this release include:

• [#6106] Organisation administrator privilege to set a spreadsheet as template and vice-versa
• [#6105] Organisation administrator privilege to purge a spreadsheet
• [#6104] Organisation administrator privilege to rename a spreadsheet
• [#6276] Acknowledgement of new organisation member
• [#6207] [#6241] Intelligent logout re-direction
• [#6159] Sort by owner at workspace
• [#6347] Organisation portal compatibility issue with Opera 9.0
• [#6271] Organisation login page formatting
• [#6236] Delete user usability enhancement
• [#6234] Fixed bug in organisation administrator’s sharing privilege
• [#6233] Integrity checking in spreadsheet ownership transfer
• [#6160] Fixed XSS in organisation login page

New interoperability features and patches rolled out in this release include:

• WSDL compliance with specification
• Fixed bug in API method doExport

Other new features include:

• [#6061] Non-persistent storage of custom number format for re-use
• [#5940] Menu item to update all linked sheets
• [#6164] Menu item to update a linked sheet
• [#3962] Auto fit row/column size by double clicking at border row/column index
• [#5279] Option to enable grid line in HTML export
• [#6249] Inhibit insert/delete all rows/columns
• [#5537] Support If-Modified-Since in HTML export
• [#6205] .new permalink — URL scheme to create new untitled spreadsheet from an existing one
• [#5799] New chat message notification
• [#5267] Include charts in HTML export

Also fixed in this release are:

• [#6367] Append UTF-8 encoding specification in MDF output
• [#6351] Enhanced on-demand loading indicator in grid
• [#6072] Remote data toolbox URL and regular expression line wrap
• [#6366] Fixed bug in remote data where data type is wrongly recognised
• [#4604] Disabled drag-and-fill effect on read-only spreadsheet
• [#6331] Fixed bug where auto save fails to preserve cell last modification record
• [#6354] Fixed XSS in remote data toolbox
• [#5996] [#6376] Fixed bug in HTML export on default background
• [#6345] Fixed bug in RTU on default background
• [#6343] Fixed bug where chart may become invisible upon sheet switching
• [#5982] Grid context menu size detection code malfunction
• [#5906] Fixed bug in inserting linked sheet after current sheet
• [#6155] Fixed bug where date object in imported spreadsheet is not recognised properly
• [#6221] Removed “Public Spreadsheets” button in workspace table header
• [#5419] Inhibited deleted spreadsheets on workspace RSS feed
• [#6230] More descriptive error page for export error
• [#6222] Fixed bug in importing spreadsheet as public user
• [#6194] Chat stability enhancement
• [#5635] Ctrl+left-click fails to honour multiple selection
• [#5924] Consistent ordering of tags
• [#6172] Import page outlook enhancement
• [#6190] Generated thumbnail properly for charts in extreme dimensions
• [#6185] Fixed bug in deleting multiple spreadsheets of which some are incoming
• [#6192] Fixed bug in toolbox where dragging would reset scrollbar position
• [#6102] Default Content-Type to text/plain for cell/range permalink
• [#5796] Fixed live chat message history auto scroll to bottom malfunction
• [#5095] Fixed bug in GridSearch where an empty result set would give exception

Quoting ecmanaut:

“EditGrid does lots of things right, and in great style. They even care about making your URLs look good. Their developer interfaces are paid equal amounts of love and attention as are their user interfaces, which in this case is great praise for both.”

This is where work satisfaction comes from! We are so pleased to hear users’ response like that. Especially when this highlights a lot of our efforts that may have gone unnoticed.

We have spent lots of efforts in making EditGrid developer-friendly. We are no big brand - not yet anyway - and therefore the only way to get developers’ attention is to make good stuffs for them. And that’s why it’s particularly pleasing to get some praise on this front. Thank you. Thank you so much.

At the same time we feel ashamed. We remember our long to-do list with many more interesting and useful features in store but not yet put into reality. We are not there yet. There’s still a lot to do. Thanks ecmanaut for his compliments and reminder.

Re: full support of JSONP as recommended by ecmanaut. It is issue #6170 on our issue list. We’ll get that done soon.