Google Spreadsheets: Share Your Work - What's Google's Motive?
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Whether you love or hate Google Spreadsheets, or just think it's a good start and can use some improvement, there's one question that everyone keeps coming back to: what's Google getting out of this? The limited beta is free; having started out as a free service, albeit "by invitation only," it will be difficult for Google to begin charging for it even after it's out of beta.
So where's the money? Kimberly wondered how Google would benefit from this service, and whether they were going to run ads. Again, she wasn't the only one thinking along those lines.
At least one analyst hoped that this wasn't Google's plan. People working on spreadsheets are pretty task-oriented. An ad would be worse than out of place in such an application; it would be downright annoying. And yet...it has been said before that ads would be annoying as part of web search, or as part of email. Now we hardly notice them. Could Google be onto something?
We won't find out for sure until Google Spreadsheets comes out of its limited beta. Will enough users love the ability to share spreadsheets? Will they love it so much that they're willing to forgive the presence of Google ads? Or will Google find another way to monetize the application?
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