An unusually twee announcement on the Official Google Blog says "We're expecting": "we've been dying to tell you about the bun we've got in the oven. We'll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations."
The story is that Google has bought Tonic Systems for its Java-based PowerPoint-compatible presentation system. This will eventually join Google Docs & Spreadsheets. "Our due date is this summer. We promise to share family photos just as soon as we can," says Google.
In an interview on stage at the Web 2.0 Expo, Google boss Eric Schmidt was asked if it would compete with Microsoft Office, Schmidt said, "We don't think so. It doesn't have all the functionality, nor is it intended to have the functionality of products like Microsoft Office."
Which is true. In fact, it's going to provide a useful extra in helping Office/PowerPoint users to collaborate online, and extend the appeal of the PowerPoint format by making it easier to share slides with people who don't own Office. All this is good for Microsoft. On the other hand, it provides light PowerPoint users with a good reason not to buy a full copy of Office, and in the longer term, there is no assurance that Google's version won't gain extra features that make it a PowerPoint replacement. In sum, Google is just using the "Embrace and extend" approach straight out of Microsoft's playbook.
On his Rough Type blog, Nick Carr has a post headed Google buys PowerPoint editor with screen grabs of the old TonicPoint site (above), which has now been vaped.
One unanswered question is: What happened to the Google PowerPoint knock-off known as Presently (code-named after Writely, the Word knock-off Google bought to create Google Docs)? See, for example, Google Prepares a Presentation Tool at the Google Operating System (not Google) blog on February 4 and followed up by WebProNews.
