Your office online
Permalink | June 19th, 2006
As Google and others race to move the ever-so-popular word processing and spreadsheet programs to the web, the person that ultimately benefits (at least in the near term) is you; but while these programs may be free, what are the real hidden costs?
Google has already opened up its Google Spreadsheets application to beta testing, and is working to make the recently acquired Writely word processing application available soon. The obvious upside to using Google’s solutions over, for example, Microsoft’s is the immediate cost savings — a legitimate copy of Microsoft Office standard edition will run you a cool $400.
That $400, though, allows you to pretty much use Office out of the box. In order to use these new online applications you not only need decent connection to the internet, you must also be comfortable with the idea that your addresses, your correspondence and your documents don’t reside on your hard drive in your computer in your home. They are stored at sites controlled by a giant company. In addition, these solutions can’t quite do everything that Word and Excel can do, at least not yet. We must also look at it from the companies’ viewpoint — they will want to eventually make money off of these ventures, and the most obvious way would be through advertising. Are people ready for ads popping up while they edit their documents?
Of course, for those already using web-based email, those hurdles aren’t a far departure from the current line of thinking. The only thing that’s left is to conquer the gap between these new applications and the “industry standard”.
