From personal experience, I'd say there's more to its "analytics engine" aspect than just pivot tables. (Not that you necessarily meant there was not.) Although it is a hearkening cry for many... "intermediate" level users as well as a significant tool for advanced users.
If people can pivot sufficiently, this is going to provide some significant competition to Excel from the perspective of many reporting demands.
I've already observed Google Doc's word processing component exceeding Word in ease of use to get to an actual, acceptable final result, for non-technical users. At that point, I really started to wonder how long it would be until Docs ate Microsoft's lunch with respect to the office suite market.
A big, conservative anchor still being data privacy and hosting. There's a lot of stuff people (still) simply can't/won't put into someone else's cloud/computers.
Collaboration alone is worth a ton. Even if the document is stuck in word for formatting at the end, docs makes it ridiculously easy to pass around edits.
So true. If I need to co-write a paper or presentation I either use Latex and Git (for serious work) or Google Docs for one off stuff. Nothing beats Latex for writing something really lengthy, but the setup time is too much for quick 1-2 page documents.
Case in point, in order to convert a .doc file to html was a nightmare from Word (last used 2007 and 2008 on Win/Mac) - this is especially useful if posting on craigslist/certain blogs.
Piping it through Google docs removes like 90% of the deadweight markup and makes it more compliant while retaining nearly all of the formatting.
If people can pivot sufficiently, this is going to provide some significant competition to Excel from the perspective of many reporting demands.
I've already observed Google Doc's word processing component exceeding Word in ease of use to get to an actual, acceptable final result, for non-technical users. At that point, I really started to wonder how long it would be until Docs ate Microsoft's lunch with respect to the office suite market.
A big, conservative anchor still being data privacy and hosting. There's a lot of stuff people (still) simply can't/won't put into someone else's cloud/computers.