Not Fighting Old Battles
“Google, as it has itself said repeatedly, is not interested in fighting old wars. Microsoft won the war for spreadsheet applications. Google’s fighting a new war, a war that’s barely begun. It’s the war for web services. And it knows that, for the foreseeable future, these services will not displace desktop applications but extend them. Google is happy to make Excel more valuable as long as it also encourages greater use of the Internet and, in particular, attracts more traffic to its own sites. In a way, Spreadsheets is not only an Excel complement; it also turns Excel into a complement to Google’s own services and the lucrative ads that those services carry.”