Simon’s Blog

Google may unveil a key new component of its office suite next week at TechCrunch40, the demo-like conference being organised by Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis. Named Presently the new software is a presentation tool, analoguous to PowerPoint in Microsoft’s Office suite. Please note – Mike and Jason haven’t actually said that Google is announcing a presentation tool; only that Google is presenting something. So, this is just a guess on my part.

Presently will be an important component for Google’s suite of on-line office apps, because it rounds out the core product set: e-mail; word processor; spreadsheet; and presentation tool. In fact, provided Google have implemented the right feature set, then it’s not just important; it could actually be the killer offering in the suite.

What is the killer feature that would make the offering killer? Well, it’s the same killer on-line feature I’ve previously suggested to Microsoft for PowerPoint 2007 – fully-featured, embeddable on-line presentations. By fully-featured, I mean including all animations, transitions, movies, sounds, interactive features etc. In other words – if it works in the “native” slideshow, it needs to work in exactly the same way with the on-line embeddable version. For Microsoft, I suggested doing this via a “Export As Silverlight” feature – that could really drive adoption of the Silverlight plug-in. Google could obviously be platform agnostic about the implementaiton, as long as it’s trivially embeddable in blogs etc.

Why do I think such a feature is important for Google’s Presently? Simple. Because they have no hope of competing with PowerPoint head-on – pretty much everyone who wants to run presentations on a video projector plugged into a laptop already uses PowerPoint. Hardly anyone is looking to switch – on the whole, people like PowerPoint. So, there’s not much point in Google simply making a “web copy” of PowerPoint. Rather to be useful, Presently needs to do things that PowerPoint can’t; and as of today, PowerPoint can’t export killer embeddable presentations.

Anyway, take all this with a pinch of salt. As I said above, while Google will certainly be presenting presently at TechCrunch40 (if you get my meaning), they might not actually be presenting Presently. Watch this space.