Our feature presentation
In April we announced that we were working to bring presentations to Google Docs. (Astute readers may recall learning about this even earlier, which caused a bit of excitement around here.) And today we're unveiling the new Google Docs presentations feature …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google had teased this since April, when it said presentations were coming to Google Docs, and a premature leak earlier in the year built anticipation inside the company itself. Today's launch closes that loop, with TechCrunch framing it as the completion of an 'office triple play' alongside documents and spreadsheets.
The pickup is unusually broad for a product feature: the Associated Press ran it as a story about Google expanding its online software suite, while Read/WriteWeb, InsideGoogle and TechCrunch all treated the arrival of 'Presently' as a milestone in the browser-based office-suite race.
First-order effects
- Google Docs users gain in-browser slideshow creation and sharing, making the free suite cover documents, spreadsheets and presentations in one place for the first time.
- The launch puts a free, web-delivered presentation tool directly against paid desktop presentation software, giving buyers a zero-cost option for basic slide work.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent desktop office vendors face pressure to answer on the two axes Google is competing on — browser delivery and easy sharing — or cede lightweight use cases.
- Other web-office players (Zoho, ThinkFree and peers in the same coverage cycle) must differentiate beyond feature parity, since Google just matched their core trio.
Third-order effects
- If documents, spreadsheets and slides live in the browser under one account, productivity software drifts from installed files toward shared URLs, with collaboration rather than formatting as the selling point — a structure that favors whoever owns the login, not the disk.
The trend: Office productivity software is migrating from installed desktop applications to free, browser-based suites where the document is a shared link rather than a file.