Into 2007… (cont’d)
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007In 2006, we brought EditGrid to life. In 2007, we will continue to innovate in the online spreadsheet domain.
What can you expect from us? Hmm… a lot.
Here’s an outline of our vision for 2007. The following diagram is what we think the current situation of enterprise software market is (Inspired by Rod Boothby).
Large vendors are still dominating a multi-billion market of software spending where the needs are sophisticated and the stake is high. Software-as-a-Service (”SaaS”) is emerging in the form of web apps, grasping a sizable market share. If we telescope into the complete landscape of enterprise software needs, we can see that a large chunk of business needs is still being served by millions of spreadsheets built by the users themselves. A good deal of simple and specific needs are, well, unserved.
What do the vast amount of users in this long tail really need? They need, first of all, simplicity. The conventional paradigm of “application + database” combo is an overkill. In most cases, what is required is simply a user-interface to manipulate structured or semi-structured data — preferrably with primitive programming support.
The other major need in the long tail is collaboration. The collaborative spreadsheet problem, as we name it, is a common phenomenon. Sending spreadsheets by email and then manually merge different sources into the “final version” is too painful a process to go through — but it was a must for multi-user collaboration.
We see high potential in the field of online spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are simple and flexible. A spreadsheet application is almost the simplest way you can get to manage structured data. It is easy to use and learn. It can even manage semi-structured data. What’s more, it supports a good degree of programmability through formula and functions.
And then you add the missing piece, online collaboration. This compliments the traditional spreadsheet’s single biggest failure, its largely single-user mode of operation. With online collaboration features, spreadsheets can easily become the medium of choice for many kinds of data management and manipulation.
This is what we think future landscape will look like.
EditGrid is not there yet. We’re still assembling a few missing pieces. This is our innovation focus in 2007.
Stay tuned.