John Markoff’s had the nod…

SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — Stepping up its attack on Microsoft’s core business, Google plans to make available on Tuesday a test version of a Web-based spreadsheet program that is intended to make it simple to edit and share lists and data online.

The company said that the free program, called Google Spreadsheets, would be able to read and create files in the format used by Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet software that is installed on millions of personal computers. The spreadsheet service is another step in Google’s steady march toward creating its own computing universe that is an alternative to desktop PC software now dominated by Microsoft. It comes just months after Google bought a small Silicon Valley company called Upstartle, creators of a Web-based word-processing program called Writely…

What took them so long?

Later…There’s lots of commentary in the Blogosphere today about what this signifies. The obvious interpretation is that Google is really attacking Microsoft. If it is, then it’s doing so in a really smart way, because it’s refusing to fight on Microsoft’s territory — which is the platform, i.e. the PC. Google has declined to compete in that space and is providing services on the Web which offer a severely limited amount of the functionality that Microsoft provides in its PC software. Nicholas Carr has an interesting post to this effect. Extract:

So why would Google put out a product that makes its arch-rival’s product more valuable? Because Google doesn’t want to compete with Office. It sees Office as part of the existing landscape, and it wants to build a new layer of functionality on top of that landscape. No one is going to stop buying Office because Google Spreadsheets exists. But what people may well do is use Spreadsheets for sharing Excel and other data online – rather than just emailing Excel files around, as they used to. If Google Spreadsheets competes with a Microsoft product, it competes with a Microsoft product that doesn’t yet exist: Excel Live, Microsoft’s own web interface for Excel data.

For the last two Sundays some unexplained glitch has prevented the publication of my column on the Web edition of the Observer. While an explanation is being sought (and the Editor looks for The Guilty Man) I’ve decided to go in for a spot of self-publication.

The column for May 28 is here. It’s about corporate hubris and the risks thereof. Sample:

Nothing succeeds like success, especially in the wishful thinking of technology companies and their Wall Street shareholders. The moment a company shows signs of dominating a particular market, then its executives — and their stockholders — begin to dream about dominating other markets in which they had hitherto no expertise. They are encouraged in this delusion by the mainstream media, which are irresistibly fascinated by the hubris implicit in corporate megalomania.

The best-known case study is, of course Microsoft…

But the column is actually as much about Google as about the Gates empire.

The column for today (4 June) is here. Sample:

If, like me, you while away the time while waiting for a Tube train by browsing the display ads on the wall opposite the platform, you will have been struck by some recent Microsoft advertisements. They show office workers wearing dinosaur-head masks engaging in laboured banter, in which one worker berates the other for his or her obsolete work practices.

My first reaction was to conclude that Microsoft had picked a turkey of an advertising agency, because the ads and the dialogue are so entirely devoid of the creativity that large advertising budgets are supposed to command. But this rapidly gave way to puzzlement. You see, it’s clear that the people in the ads are users of Microsoft software: they have to be because most office workers are. So why is Microsoft insulting its users by portraying them as dinosaurs? After all, treating your customers as idiots is not generally a sustainable business strategy — though the record and movie industries haven’t quite twigged that yet. But Microsoft isn’t a brain-dead organisation like Sony BMG or Warner Brothers. Au contraire. So what’s going on with these daft ads?

I missed this.

Under the terms of a roughly three-year pact announced yesterday, Google will pay Dell an unspecified sum to have its browser toolbar and desktop-search software pre-installed on the company’s PCs and their homepages set to a co-branded portal site. “The real reason we do this is for users,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas. People “turn the Dell machine on, and everything is integrated right there. (This deal) is a turnkey solution for search.”

It’s a turnkey solution for Google as well, at least when it comes to wresting control of PC users’ default settings away from Microsoft. Dell shipped more than 37 million PCs and servers globally in 2005, according to research group IDC. That means Google could conceivably put its software in front of 100 million new PC owners over the life of the deal, and that’s the sort of footprint that can preserve its search dominance over Microsoft…

This seems very significant to me. Wonder why there hasn’t been more coverage of it. Or did I just miss the commentary as well as the announcement?