Google has announced it will offer an online spreadsheet application, which sounds terrific in theory. How many times have you wished you could have several people on a phone call all look at the same spreadsheet at the same time, and even make live updates while talking. And a spreadsheet stored online means you don't have to keep emailing copy after copy of the same spreadsheet to people just because you updated a single cell.
So what's not to like about the Google app?
For starters, how about losing control over all the information in your spreadsheet? Google's sample page shows a spreadsheet that has information about a Little League baseball team. Great. Put the phone numbers, names, email, and addresses of minors in a spreadsheet and give it to a company that is very likely to mine all that information and sell it to advertisers, to say nothing of the security problems of having all that fall into the hands of sexual predators.
And any business that uses this to save a few bucks on software is crazy. You have no control over what Google does with this information, and why would you let Google have access to all your financial information, customers names and addresses, and all the other sorts of critical business information that routinely gets put into spreadsheets.
I'll pass on this one.