Google’s are free - MS’s aren’t, and that ought to say a lot :)

Thank you to Elinor Mills at the News Blog;

Gadgets comes to Google Docs

Google on Wednesday unveiled Gadgets for Spreadsheets in Google Docs, allowing people to create graphical representations of data in spreadsheets and publish them on Web sites.

[Google Docs lets you turn your data into a Motion Chart in a spreadsheet via a Google Gadget. (Credit: Google)]

For consumers, this means they have a dozen or so new ways to look at data in their spreadsheets. Google has put up a gallery of specialty gadgets to choose from. They include gadgets to display data on a pie chart, map, time chart, funnel chart, Gantt chart, pivot table, and on a heat map if it’s geographical data. You can even create interactive charts like those used by Google Finance and for motion charts.

Which is all good stuff - right? It is interesting to me…

What becomes more interesting, as always, is the ending comment to the article;

“With the enhancements, Google is ratcheting up the competition its free Web-hosted apps are giving Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, which companies pay for.”

When you’re the top dog, you can allow yourself a lot of leeway with the manner in which you conduct yourself and your business. Sometimes you can even thumb your nose at your competition :)

Putting those three words in the same sentence ought to earn you… a night in purgatory or something similar. That is almost the same as putting “Scott Cleland” “Net Neutrality” and “Truth” together.

From “In State of the Union, Bush to begin framing legacy”

“After all, few people still are looking to Bush for political leadership, says George Edwards III, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. Only about one-third of the country approves of his job performance. A majority of Americans believe that beginning the war in Iraq was a mistake, according to many polls. Many voters have tuned out the White House to focus on the contenders for the 2008 presidential election, Dr. Edwards says.

‘He’s got very little political capital,’ says Edwards of Bush.”

On another war front, Erik Larkin tells us;

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