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Financial Software - Wednesday, June 20, 2007

At Powerpoint's 20th Anniversary Google Buys Its 2nd PowerPoint Startup With Zenter

Google has bought pre-launch Zenter for an undisclosed amount. Zenter makes Web-based Powerpoint-like presentation applications. Google is apparently finding that the best development of Web presentation software is taking place at startups - last April at acquired Tonic Systems. Either that or these are defensive buys to lock up Web-based spreadsheet IP. But we think that is unlikely.

Zenter raised a small amount of funding from incubator YCombinator and Evan Williams blogs that he owns some stock in the company. Williams explains that he bought the domain name Zenter as he had thoughts of creating his own online presentation startup.

Google continues to do M&A at early stages. The risk of course is that another startup will come along with a much better tool. This may have happened for example when Google bought Blogger and afterwards any number of startups have launched superior blogging platforms.

The purpose of Google's activity around Web-based applications, of course is to woo users off of licensed Microsoft Office applications to free, ad supported applications on Google. Microsoft bought the origins of Powerpoint in 1987 when it did its first acquisition, paying $14M for Powerpoint 1.0 for Macs. It took 3 years for Microsoft to publish a Windows version.

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