So google does it again, as promised by Eric Schmidt earlier this summer, google presentations was released on the last official week of summer. Now it’s not quite power point yet (remember they have had a couple of years of head start), but is quite usable and actually offers some neat features missing from the standard power point. One of them is sharing and shared editing, the other is online presentation where you can actually invite people to look at your presentation, go through it with them and discuss your points over text chat. Now I know it’s not quite like standing in a room and presenting to real people, but something tells me that voice chat is right around the corner.
My biggest problem — and it’s not so much a problem than a missing feature — is that there is no ppt export function, but again I think those boys and girls at google are busy working on it right now :-).
Now if google can maintain the momentum of this platform (google docs) for another 2-3 years, I predict that people will seriously start to think about upgrading to Office 2010 (or whatever it will be called). With google docs on the market and Openoffice/Lotus Symphony/Abiword killer trio I think the days of expensive/closed office packages are over.