Google Office - 2 Domain Registration Clues

When Google acquired Writely we saw that Google is interested in either building components for its own "office suite" or at least staving off competitors' access to these tools and their masterminds through acquisition.

Here are 2 more clues that Google might be developing Power Point and Excel competitors:

GoogleGrid .net .org .info (.com owned by 3rd party)
GoogleLecture .com .net .org .info

Google registered the top-level domains for GoogleLecture and GoogleGrid on the same day last year, January 14, 2005. Google's domain name registration patterns indicate that when a set of related domains is registered on all of the major top levels on the same day, a product release is coming. (Although Google may never release its products at GoogleProduct.com, it registers the names to prevent spammers/competitors from redirecting traffic otherwise meant for product.google.com.)

Google Grid
The phrase "Google Grid" was popularized through the video Epic 2015 as a futuristic look at Google's storage project - GDrive. But it also sounds like a perfect name for a web-based spreadsheet and data app that organizes data through grids. (Google might want to look toward NumSum or Dabble DB [review | demo] as acquisition targets.)

Google Lecture
This could be a red herring as Google refers to certain in-house video talks as "Google Lectures" (over on Google Video). But thinking bigger picture, Google Lecture also sounds like a potential name for a presentation app like Power Point/Keynote or the group work apps from 37 Signals. I do feel Google Lecture is an unfortunate naming choice since "lecture" has more of a drudgery connotation than words like "present." But certainly the registration of the name, so closely relating to lecture and presentations, is interesting.

In sum, since Google registered all top level domains for 2 office-related names on the same day last year, I'm betting that Google Office is very much in the works.