Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

Vinny reckons that Vinny Google has hit a home run with Google Spreadsheet… I’m not so sure.

Having had to suffer dial-up for the last few WEEKS (more to come on that later… so much anger… anyway…) the very idea of a Web App is a bit dumb. Assuming you have an internet connection is a very bad thing…

Also, spreadsheets suck… there has to be better ways to put data into flows… oh yes there is isn’t there… they are called dataflows. Once upon a time there was a spreadsheet called Spreadsheet2000 (nee LKISS) that let you wire tables of numbers together and use the outputs and inputs to other tables. It was flawed and wonderful.

The only time you need to be “online” with a speadsheet is when you need to subscribe (or publish) some item of data. For the most part, that doesn’t need to happen ALL-THE-TIME, it needs to happen regularly (once a day, once an hour, when a change is made etc.). A model a bit like Apple’s defunkt Publish and Subscribe would be interesting. If tables or formulas were subscribeable and publishable over WebDav with a simple URL … maybe even Subversion (maybe a bit too hardcore)… they you could build a distributed dataflow… where you enter some data into your tables and the “shared” graph updates itself…

Of course I’ve not had a play with Google spreadsheet yet… but sharing a spreadsheet with someone else is so 1992… but then Google seem hell bent on mimicking MicroSoft Office… something we already have (and loathe)… but I guess the Google Spreadsheet tool really doesn’t anything worthwhile and innovative to the way we work… which would be surprising…. I hope I’m wrong…