Scoble on the Google Spreadsheet:

Ahh, middleware 2.0 wars coming soon to a browser near you. Why? Cause as Google gets more people to try its spreadsheets more people will ask for more features. If they don't get those features the PR will turn back toward Microsoft's approach (since our Office has a lot more features than Google's offerings do). There will be pressure on at Google to add features but DHTML (er, Ajax) will simply run out of gas. So, you'll start seeing middleware coming down. (Runtimes like .NET, Flash, Java, and WPF, are what I'm thinking about -- I'd bet that Google is working on a browser-runtime of its own that'll add a lot of local functionality to Web clients).

I don't think most users of this kind of software will want lots of new features. The target for this isn't power spreadsheet users - it's small groups that want to collaborate with (relatively small) datasets. We've seen an example in this space already: DabbleDB.

Consider most spreadsheets you see. Do most people use any of the non-basic features? Or do most people do a quick set of calculations, and possibly some simple charts? I'd say it's the latter, by a very wide margin. I think Robert misreads the target audience for this kind of application, and even for the spreadsheet in general. Heck, I'm in Product Management, and I can tell you that I create only very simple spreadsheets - which is what I suspect most people do.

Sure, there are power users, and they use a lot of the advanced stuff. I doubt that any of those users are serious targets of this kind of online application.