Less than 12 hours after we posted our review of the Web Office Suite space, Google has seemingly put the last piece of the jigsaw in place for their suite. Today Google announced it has acquired the assets of Zenter, “a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.” This technology will be added to Tonic Systems, a technology for presentation creation and document conversion. Tonic Systems was acquired in April by Google. Nick Gonzalez says that “Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features”, so it will be a nice complement to Tonic.
Prior to the acquisition, Zenter’s homepage noted it was “preparing for private beta” and it had the usual email form for interested beta testers to fill out. They were also looking for people with “serious JavaScript and/or Java programming skills”.
So it is likely that Presentations capability will be added to Google Docs & Spreadsheets soon (meaning Google will have to re-think the name for that product!). As GigaOm notes, Google still needs to work on its overall product integration – i.e. making it a true suite offering – and the UI/brand needs work too.
Google Apps at this point is a fairly higgelty-piggelty product offering, as indeed is its closest suite competitor Zoho. Both have plenty of Web Office apps, but there is nothing from either company that jumps out and says “I’m a Suite!”. Therefore both Google and Zoho have a ways to go to compete with Microsoft Office.
Here is an updated Web Office Suite table, after this news today:
