For most of us, working in Excel means we’re too lazy to create a multi row table in Word or Powerpoint using the lame table editing tool.  Or maybe we’re tallying up some financial results.  The more complex users might even dabble in pivot tables.

But for financial analysts running complex models and scenarios in Excel, there are some real constraints.  I only know this from my days working in the grid computing industry.  One of the anticipated killer apps for financial services was always a spreadsheet program that you could run from your desktop or laptop without the constraints of your local processor and memory.  In fact, Excel even imposes a limit to the number of rows you can have in a worksheet (65,000 I think) so if you have more data driving your model, you’re out of luck.

By now, I think we all know that Google builds all of its apps on top of one of the world’s more sophisticated compute grids.  That was necessary for its search algorithms, and now powers everything they release.  Imagine how much processor and memory is consumed by apps like Maps and Earth. 

Does that mean that Google Spreadsheet is automatically running in a parallel, distributed environment?  If so, that might just be the killer app financial analysts have been waiting for.

Russell Campbell seems to think that his PC is faster and more secure than Google’s data center.  That must be one kick-ass PC Russell!