Friday, 17 November 2006

Google Buys Israel Start-up iRows

Internet search company Google is planning to buy its first Israeli startup, iROWS, a online spreadsheet company. Though Google denied acquiring iRows, iRows founders have joined Google and will shut down the site on December 31, 2006...

Internet search company Google is planning to buy its first Israeli startup, iROWS, a online spreadsheet company.

Though Google denied acquiring iRows, iRows founders have joined Google and will shut down the site on December 31, 2006. With this acquisition, Google, which recently launched Google Spreadsheets, has acquired supplementary technology.

In recent months, Google has been concentrating on building an online office software package that will offer users free online services, which are later intended to compete against Microsoft, which dominates the office software market with its Office suite. Microsoft will launch a new version of Office in January.

Google, meanwhile, appears to be gobbling up companies that can round out its Web-based productivity applications. A few weeks ago, Google bought JotSpot, a company with a system for building collaborative Web pages called Wikis.

On the other hand, the Open Document movement, from the OASIS industry consortium, is slowly but surely wresting Microsoft's market dominance in word and spreadsheet applications. The Oasis consortium is formed by government and public institutions around the world, as well as software vendors that commit to public licenses.

Governments all over the world are starting to demand a common open standard for their documents, are no longer limited to using Microsoft's Word and Excel applications. The idea is that documents are stored in an open public domain format, such that anybody can write a program to process the document, all software vendors can compete in providing a word and spreadsheet applications.