Google Presentations at Last

Google today announced their Online presentation application. It isn’t going to win any awards for beauty (baaad templates!) and it is next to useless in the Safari Browser – much better in Firefox – but it is a huge step in the right direction.  

The chat and collaborative features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets are there which opens the possibility of online presentation building and “presenting.” However, it has obvious downsides as well.  It is certainly not as full featured as current presentation tools like Powerpoint and Keynote.  

It doesn’t do:

• Animations of any kind
• Advanced image manipulation
• Advanced text formatting
• Sound
• Video
• Exporting PowerPoint files

What it does:

• Imports PowerPoint files
• Exports HTML file
• 15 built-in themes
• Text formatting
• Basic image manipulation functionality (adding, resizing)
• Versioning
• Collaboration
• Online presentation sharing

However,  it doesn’t work too well on Safari – which means it doesn’t work too well on the iPhone either(thought we could write a post without mentioning that?).  Yeah we tried it – it doesn’t work at all – just gives an error message – for now.

So back to industry implications.  It certainly may help break up the Microsoft monopoly on office software (not that Powerpoint was anything impressive) and makes the OS a bit less important.  It really doesn’t effect Apple’s Keynote too much because Keynote’s audience is the aesthetically capable and Google is promoting a bare bones solution (at least now).  It will certainly hurt Zoho Office’s offering.

Really, though, we are waiting for Google’s Wiki tool to come out.  They bought Jotspot like 200 years ago – what are they waiting for already?!  Is it us or is Google’s innovation machine slowing to a crawl?