與微軟的PowerPoint展開競爭

雅虎谷歌仍在覬覦微軟地盤

2007年09月18日18:33 wsj

網絡巨頭雅虎公司(Yahoo! Inc.)和谷歌(Google Inc.)正在向微軟(Microsoft Corp.)地盤發起新的衝擊﹐它們競相推出基於網路的電子郵件和演示應用軟件產品﹐來挑戰微軟的傳統主營業務。

雅虎週一宣佈簽署一項協議﹐以3.50億美元現金加股票的價格收購集中持股的Zimbra Inc.﹐後者是一家開發網絡電子郵件用軟件的企業﹐其軟件被大學、網絡服務供應商、中小企業等採用﹐客戶數量超過了1,300家。

雅 虎表示﹐公司希望通過此項收購提升電子郵件業務﹐將業務範圍延伸至Zimbra所掌握的大學、企業市場。目前雅虎的電子郵件用戶數量已經達到2.50億。 Zimbra的電子郵件帳戶共有900萬付費用戶﹐它的郵件服務提供群組日曆和文件共享等功能﹐Zimbra憑藉這種類似Microsoft Exchange、但更為經濟的產品在一定程度上對微軟構成了威脅。

另外﹐谷歌週二也計劃發佈其基於網絡的演示應用軟件﹐它將與微軟的PowerPoint展開競爭。

Kevin J. Delaney

Google Unwraps Presentations

Not even a week after I reviewed Google's word processor and spreadsheet, the company launched a presentation program that gives it a full set of Web-based productivity tools. The news came out in a blog posting Monday night, followed soon after by an e-mail from Google's public-relations department. (Note to Google PR: This is information I could have used a week ago. I'm just sayin'...)

After a quick tryout, the new Presentations program looks like a solid but unpolished counterpart to the other Google Web programs. Like its siblings, it does an extraordinary job of making a Web site look and work exactly like a disk-based application: You can move and resize images and text boxes by dragging them around with the cursor, just like in Microsoft's PowerPoint, and right-clicking invokes a short menu with context-sensitive commands ("new slide," "change theme," "send to back," "send to front" and so on).

Presentations doesn't provide much design flexibility, though. You can choose from just six fonts and five slide layouts, and you can't change the background color or pattern at all except by picking from one of 15 prefab themes like "Chalkboard" or "Pink n' Pretty." You can insert your own images if they're under 2 megabytes each, but only if they come from your hard drive--you can't copy them over from an album saved on Google's own Picasa photo-sharing site. Odder yet, in my test Presentations rejected several JPEGs on the grounds that they were in an "invalid image format."

Presentations can import PowerPoint files up to 10 megabytes in size; two fairly dense marketing presentations came through with only cosmetic problems, such as an incorrectly indented line of text. It cannot, however, save your work as a PowerPoint file. Instead, it keeps everything in HTML format, which makes online sharing easy but makes offline storage slightly awkward, since saving a slide show to your desktop gets you a .zip archive of separate image and HTML files.

Have you tried Presentations yet? How's it been working out for you?

By Rob Pegoraro | September 19, 2007; 10:29 AM ET | Category: The Web
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