Disclosure: Central Desktop is a current sponsor.
Today Web Office company Central Desktop announced a new online
spreadsheets feature, via a collaboration with HongKong-based company Team and Concepts
(TnC) Ltd and its EditGrid product. You may remember we profiled
EditGrid last week and touted it as ‘better than Google Spreadsheets’. We said in
that post that EditGrid is a feature-packed app that is best in class, but that it
required partnerships with other vendors to be truly successful. Already it’s integrated
into start pages
Netvibes,
Pageflakes and
Google Personalized Homepage, plus Salesforce
AppExchange and several SaaS products and platforms. Now Central Desktop has
integrated EditGrid too.
I spoke with Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia to find out more about the partnership.
Central Desktop is a collaboration platform, similar to 37Signal’s Basecamp. It’s focus
is on small-to-medium businesses, as an alternative to complex, traditional groupware
products such as Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes. Central Desktop has what Isaac
referred to as a “team level focus” and its features include collaborative document
editing, Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. The
addition of EditGrid means that users can also now collaborate on spreadsheets, in
real-time within the Central Desktop environment.
What I especially like about this announcement is that it’s a great example of how two
small ‘web 2.0’ companies can partner in order to grow. We spoke last month about the
partnership between Zoho (a Web Office suite — n.b. also a R/WW sponsor) and
Omnidrive (online storage provider). I’m sure there are other examples, but in this world
of best-of-breed web apps it makes total sense for small web companies to partner. It
fits with the general Web culture of ‘small pieces loosely joined’ and is also an
effective way for the small companies to compete with giants like Google, Microsoft and
Yahoo. The bigcos have the advantage of being able to connect all of their various
properties together, so one way for small companies to try and combat that is to join
forces. I hope we see a lot more partnerships between small web companies, because it’s
good for the Web ecosystem to have many successful small companies competing adequately
with the big guns.
To investigate that theme further, I asked Issac what advantages Central Desktop /
EditGrid combo has over, say, Google Spreadsheets. Isaac said that EditGrid is a real-time technology and essentially an extension of Excel. He said that EditGrid in Central Desktop means it’s being used in the context of a fixed workspace, which
gives it an advantage over Google Spreadsheets (which is generally used – ironically perhaps,
given what I just wrote – in isolation to other Google apps).
