Excel began as a powerful, programmable spreadsheet, which over time gained more and more collaborative capabilities. Excel has its own programming language that gave rise to a generation of spreadsheet programmers who could build an entire company's financial underpinnings on spreadsheets.

Those macro command-driven spreadsheets would then be e-mailed around a company for comments. At some point someone would try to collect all those spreadsheets and come up with a common data set.

Eventually those spreadsheets were moved to a server, which made it easier to keep a spreadsheet version of a company's financials, but developing a rights and permissions scheme around who could or could not access or change a spreadsheet drove many an IT manager to distraction.

And when the programmer who wrote the macros that drove the company left, companies were often stuck with spreadsheet stacks that were unfathomable.

Spreadsheets are still widely used to measure a company's financial performance, despite the continued rise of financial application packages that are both affordable and powerful. I suppose inertia is the main reason for keeping track of your company financials on something as shaky as a spreadsheet.

Here is what the Google spreadsheet would require to make it in the corporate world:

1. Ownership. While Salesforce.com and NetSuite have shown that you can have your corporate apps running on a hosted server, they have also surrounded those apps with administrative and security safeguards. Customers want their corporate apps to be treated as distinct entities, not only for security, but also for compliance. The Google spreadsheet doesn't offer the robust administrative tools that a business would want.

2. Help desk. Online tech support is probably the biggest gap in the corporate offerings from companies such as Yahoo and Google. Randy Dugger, an eWEEK Corporate Partner (and formerly Director of IS for Sequus Pharmaceuticals, now part of Alza, in Menlo Park, Calif., where he was responsible for establishing and setting the direction of tactical and strategic computing resources) sent me the following comment about the tech support issue:

I read this morning about Google offering a Web spreadsheet. This goes back to a conversation about Yahoo and Google providing online apps, while offering no live tech support. While Google and Yahoo strive to encourage users to utilize their online apps, I feel their strategy is quite flawed. Where it's flawed … is the area of tech support. Both Google & Yahoo only offer tech support via e-mail. This is long and tedious to get problems resolved when a user wants to be productive again fast. If they classify the program as beta, then you get no help....

In a recent example … my custom "My Yahoo" page stopped automatically updating. After 5 days of e-mail correspondence, it finally started working again. With phone/live tech support, it probably would have been fixed in an hour or two. With Google, it's even worse ... Google Earth nearly took down a fire agency on the SF peninsula. The designer who wrote the program decided to store the map cache in the users profile. While it's great for home users, corporate users who have roaming profiles suddenly had a profile that was 20GB to download. The bandwidth consumed by users logging on choked the network. Again, only tech support via e-mail, even after calling Google directly and pleading for live assistance for a public safety organization. Instead, I was given an e-mail address and the code word of the day. Two days later I got a correspondence from them:

Both can offer tech support via a live person if they want and they should. Especially Google with billions they are bringing in ... Both organizations and for that matter any organization that thinks they can offer tech support via e-mail is sadly wrong. If you are going to offer applications for users and want to compete with Microsoft and other organizations, you have to offer live tech support. Whether it's basic for free, one or two instances for free or advanced for a fee, users want a quick resolution to their problem.

3. Horsepower. Why would anyone want to replace one pile of spreadsheets with another? Company financials should reside on financial accounting applications. Contacts should reside on CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Trying to make spreadsheets do applications for which they were never intended just won't work.

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