Google Instead Of Local Applications?
By Daniel Miessler on February 8th, 2007: Tagged as Google | Musings
Given the fact that Google is doing a word processor, a spreadsheet application, and are supposedly working on a presentation app as well, do you think it might be possible in the near future to skip the craziness of maintaining various local applications and just just Google instead?
(long sentence)
I can think of two reasons not to do this off the top of my head:
- Security: It’s not going to be easy to convince anyone (including myself) that I should edit a vulnerability assessment report online, and maintain a copy somewhere in the Googleverse.
- Outlook. Even if you could replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, email and calendaring (Exchange) is absolutely essential to business for most people. I don’t see anything replacing a fat client as the ideal interface to this resource in the foreseeable future.
But other than that…err…those, just general, personal documents and such seem ideal for web-oriented replacements. Not enough people use PowerPoint away from work, so that leaves spreadsheets, email, and word processing.
Wait a minute here: let’s do this for the two realms: business and personal.
Business:
- Email’s likely to stay in-house due to the company tie-in.
- Word processing will stay in-house due to privacy (unless Microsoft does it).
- PowerPoint (privacy again?)
- Excel (privacy again)
Personal:
- Email (already largely online)
- Word Processing (very good market for Google Docs)
- PowerPoint (not many users)
- Excel (very good Market for Google Spreadsheets)
Interesting. So the main growth areas are getting home users to not buy Microsoft Word or Excel for home use. Other than that, Microsoft is sitting fairly comfortable. Forget that you read this post; it’s been little more than a typing exercise.
I guess I just started thinking about this because I’m strongly considering dumping NewNewsWire as my newsreader and going with Google Reader. I could see that being followed up with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets as well. Anyway, I’ll put a bit more thought into it…
Thoughts?