The intrepid Ionut Alex. Chitu of the blog Google Operating System has apparently stumbled across a new Google app — a PowerPoint-style presentation service called Presently (it’s unclear whether that’s an internal code name or a real product name). As my friend Paul Kedrosky notes, this would effectively complete the Google “anti-Office,” the office-style suite that CEO Eric Schmidt has repeatedly denied building.
Like Paul and others — including my fellow mesh organizer Mark Evans — I find myself using Google’s Docs more and more in order to have documents available to me wherever I am, without having to worry about which version I have, or carrying them around on a thumb drive. And the mesh group got huge mileage out of what used to be called Writely thanks to the online collaboration tools. Speaking of which, could we please go back to the name Writely instead of Google Docs and Spreadsheets?
On a related note, I suppose this means the founders of Thumbstacks.com and other online presentation services should either be looking at adding features to differentiate themselves (online collaboration a la Vyew perhaps). Or they could always sell themselves on eBay like online calendar app Kiko did awhile back, eventually being bought by Toronto-based Tucows.