The presentation software used by millions of project managers and consultants, Microsoft’s PowerPoint, will have a competitor from Google called “Presently” as the company builds yet another piece of the office suite everyone expects will challenge Office, once it actually has enough features.
That piece of the puzzle, called Google Presently, has created some buzz among bloggers. A portion of code reviewed by Ionut Alex. Chitu at the Google Operating System blog revealed hints of the name and functions of the new service.
Chitu noted in a later comment on the blog post how the name Presently, Google’s label for the service, really does put it in like with names for its other productivity applications. Google purchased Writely for word processing; they developed a spreadsheet program to complement Writely, and its service name is Wise, so it’s probably safe to call it Wisely.
Discovering the Presently service happened the way things like penicillin and Silly Putty came into being – by accident, Chitu wrote in response to a question about the find:
Accidentally. I was trying to see if there’s a way to upload a file from the web to Google Docs using GET, rather than POST, and I checked some of their files.
Upon checking, there was the relevant section of code, containing the Presently name. The document he found was later edited to remove references to Presently, but not until after he and TechCrunch grabbed copies of the original.
Garett Rogers at Googling Google later summarized some of the points from the find:
Based on the information we can see in this file it is easy to assume:
You will be able to convert documents to presentations
Presentations can have themes
Zoom capability
Opera isn’t supported
We give Chitu credit for picking up on the Presently snippet; it’s a nice find. But we have to wonder if somewhere at Google there is a strategy to reveal information like Presently in a way that its avid base of fans will “discover” this way.
Why pay for a PR effort and sit through a bunch of interviews with the ravenous media when dropping some code into blogger laps accomplishes the same thing?
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
