almost effortless

After the Google Spreadhseet app hype, I'm pretty much behind this article:

Google-love is getting out of hand... After I wrote about the launch of Google Spreadsheets this morning, one commenter said “Its very nice and sleak. Will be very useful for keeping track of money etc, as if this was the first spreadsheet he'd ever seen... [Now] that Picasa, which Google acquired in mid-2004, will soon be adding albums... Picasa is Google's desktop photo management software something like Yahoo's Flickr, except it's not on the web. Yeah, it's just like Flickr, except without tagging, sharing, commenting and, of course, it isn't a web service.

While I appreciate Google giving their employees 20% of their time (or whatever it is) to work on pet projects, I get annoyed when everything they put out immediately gets heralded as the end of Microsoft or the greatest thing since sliced bread.

That being said, this article makes a good point:

Even if Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't have designs on toppling Microsoft Office, they do have a vested interest in toppling proprietary file formats (well, save maybe Google's own DRM). After all, what makes Google's Search possible? It's the fact that the Internet is comprised almost entirely of "open" HTML documents. The budding Google empire is built on top of an open file "format" with wide accessibility.

I'm not 100% on board that Google has a "vested interest" in open formats, and I'm pretty sure google can search Word DOCs as-is, but I do like Google's tendency toward using "open" standards. For example, their Chat service uses the Jabber protocol, which aims to make sending instant messages between services providers as easy as email. Imagine if you couldn't send email to an @aol.com from your @yahoo.com account... That's the state of things in instant messaging, and I appreciate Google coming down on the right side of that one.

Another place that Google seems to be taking a stand is on the net neutrality business that's going on with our fair government as of late:

The debate over "net neutrality" is coming to a boil in the next week as the House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that could determine the future of the Internet. The big phone and cable TV companies want Congress's permission to create a new, unprecedented regulatory bureaucracy on the Internet – a private bureaucracy of broadband monopolists with the power to determine what content gets to you first and fastest. Google believes that forcing people and companies to get permission from, and pay special fees to, the phone and cable companies to connect with one another online is fundamentally counter to the freedom and innovation that have defined the Internet... Our CEO Eric Schmidt believes this situation is so important that he has written an open letter to Google users asking them to speak out on this issue...