Google Acquires Tonic Systems, Announces Presentation App

Bilal Hameed | 5 Views

Google has finally officially announced the launch of Presentation Application to go together with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The announcement was made by Google CEO Eric Schimdt at the Web2.0 Expo (update: watch video below). The presentation service that will likely come online by the name of “Google Presently” is a result of acquisition of Tonic Systems, a San Francisco based company.

The newly acquired service will launch sometimes this summer and will allow small business users to create, share and collaborate on presentations. We also expect it to seamlessly integrate with Gmail, Google Calendar,GTalk and other Google services. I would also like to see this integrated with existing web based photo editors to edit and use web photos in presentations on the fly.

For many users this might be thrilling news, but most of us already knew it was going to happen one day. News would be when Microsoft will decide to bring its Office suite, a $12 billion per annum empire live. Currently revenues from Office division are more than the entire revenues of Google for 2006. However Microsoft is undergoing the Inventor’s dilemma on this decision, in which inventors or corporations don’t innovate or participate in an exciting new domain on the risk of killing its cash cow. The new domain in turn grows up to be another billion dollar market, eating up the old model.

Sidenote: The theory of Relational Databases was presented by an IBM researcher Dr Edgar Frank Codd in 1970. IBM proved slow to exploit this theory on the fear of losing revenues from its existing IMS/DB. Larry Ellison jumped onto this and created what we have come to know as Oracle.