Thursday, February 22, 2007

EditGrid, Google Spreadsheets Competitor

EditGrid is a beautiful (paid) spreadsheets web application in the style of Google Spreadsheets. Launched in mid 2006, EditGrid’s user base is around 15,000 personal users and 4,500 organization users, according to their own numbers.

I’ve just played around with it a bit [WMV] and as you can see, it contains many of the features Google Spreadsheets has too, and also additional features like inclusion of charts.

P.K. Chan of EditGrid sounds like he was a bit annoyed by some recent coverage of the web spreadsheets market and tells me (HTMLified):

On 20th Nielsen//NetRatings released a report [PDF] which concluded that Google Docs & Spreadsheets dominates the online productivity tool market. The report cited the figure of 445,762 unique visitors too Google Docs & Spreadsheets in October 2006 and reasoned that this accounted to 92% of unique visitors in the market, with other players (EditGrid included) sharing the remainder 8%. The news was promptly picked up by the blogosphere including, among others, the Google Operating System blog and, indeed, the Google Blogoscoped Forum. All these come before the imminent announcement of Google D&S and Google Apps integration (rumour reported on TechCrunch).

Our internal and non-public statistics, however, show that in EditGrid’s case at least, the numbers of unique visitors for the reported period (Oct - Dec 2006) compare much more favourably than that – and no way near the meagre 8% as depicted. This is more remarkable given the fact that EditGrid is a standalone online spreadsheet whereas Google D&S comprises both Docs (formerly Writely) and Spreadsheets.

Every statistic tells a different story, so I’m not very interested in comparing the two stats (see the video for a glimpse of these stats)... however, I gotta say EditGrid looks just as fine as Google Spreadsheets. There’s some minor usability flaws as with most web apps, and still EditGrid works very good overall. But the main advantage for Google is that they’re...

• “close” to the user (they can link their products from e.g. the Google homepage, and no one needs to create an extra account)
• a huge brand trusted by many, many people (whether you believe that’s justified or not)
• able to cross-integrate (aka bundle) their web apps into a single office product (of which Google Spreadsheets is then a mere part of)
• sitting on umpteen-thousand servers ready for action

These attributes are hard to beat by competition, and not necessarily because the competition is less skilled in building web tools. I’ve asked P.K. Chan what he makes of this, and he says (HTMLified):

We welcome Google as a competitor – it’s a good sign that this early market of online productivity tools is getting traction. Google has its advantage on system scalability and integration with Gmail and Google Apps, but we believe that innovation will be the key in the Web 2.0 market and we have held our grounds so far. We are proud that we still hold the lead in terms of features and functionality (my comparison matrix is here).

EditGrid, Google Spreadsh ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (14)

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