Pic: Google Spreadsheet

Here’s something we noticed on our last visit to our Google Gmail account. When someone sends you a spreadsheet you can open it there and then in Google Spreadsheet - not download it to your desktop, then open it in Excel. There’s been a lot of talk about software moving to a web-based platform for a while now, but what this shows is offering the software is not enough - it’s about ‘owning’ the relationship that allows Google to offer its suite of services. Once Microsoft owned that relationship with Windows - but now, we no longer need an operating system like we used to.