Ok, What *is* Google Doing With Google Docs

Yesterday I wrote a piece entitled Google's Losing The Word Processing War.

The point of the piece is that formatting is critical to anything attempting to replace or even supplement a word processor. Several people commented that, in essence, Google is not trying to compete on the basis of formatting, and that collaboration is really their goal.

I would agree that this is the niche that they have carved out as of now. However, I do not believe that this is their ambition. I believe they want to do three things.

• They want to cripple Microsoft, who's largest revenue generator is Office, by undercutting their pricing with a product that is "good enough."
• They actually want to create another great revenue stream along side search in the corporate market
• Their mission is about organizing the worlds information. If you are going to organize the worlds information you better be able or organize and edit Microsoft office documents, and you better become an ideal repository for them. Google wants to be such a repository.

Right now Google Docs will allow you to edit Word documents but you do not see formatting properly, and if you edit you have a significant likelihood of destroying formatting information that was there when the document was initially created.

My view is that if any of these three things are your real goal, you cannot win without doing a good job... no, a *really* good job with what people use a word processor for. And despite the fact that Google Documents does a great job with collaboration, I do not believe that you can provide a good alternative to Word or even a good repository for Word documents if you cannot edit them properly or even see at least the most basic of formatting properly. In short, to do any of the three listed items, Google must be able to format at least as well as Word For Windows 1.0 or MacWrite circa 1984.

I do not believe that Google can get everyone to believe that font selection, and tabs, and line spacing and decent graphics embedding and formatting are things that just don't matter any more. Yes Word has more features than most people need. But that generalization does not extend down to this basic level of formatting. I do not believe that Google, powerful though it is, can make people think that these really basic things aren't important. Because most important documents in business need to be printed at some point. And formatting is important.

Now to be clear, my criticism is *not* that they don't have all the formatting features that are needed. I totally buy the idea of starting somewhere and making things better over time. My concern is that given that Google Documents is HTML based, YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE. And almost none of the code they currently have will be useful towards a proper solution.

This is a huge point. HTML for word processing is a cul-de-sac. A dead end. You cannot provide good formatting features using it. And this concern can only be mitigated if you believe that Google's plan is not world domination, or if you believe that some day soon printing is going to be an obsolete concept. And if you believe either of those things I've got a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.