Technology musings…

I’ve been a long-time user of Microsoft Office and to be quite honest, I’ve been relatively satisfied with it.  Office, in my opinion, provides the best overall integrated collection of applications that people need for school and business.  Until I needed more than just word processing, I believed that WordPerfect was a better stand-alone product because of its ease of use, powerful features, and control over the document.  Even though I’ve been satisfied with Office, and even consider myself a "power user" of Word, Excel, and Outlook, I haven’t had a compelling reason to upgrade and am still using Office XP Professional.  **On a side note, I have no idea how anyone chooses a "flavour" of office any more!  There are eight distinct versions for the 2007 release and I have difficulty understanding the comparison chart as I don’t even know what half of the products are.

As many of you know, Google has ventured into the office application market with their Google Docs product.  With a modern browser and relatively fast Internet connection, you have now have access to a range of office applications.  For those who don’t know, Google Docs is Google’s online, web-based office application suite that (for now) includes word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications.  There are other applications that are available, but I’m going to focus on Google’s current offering as an example.  If you’d like to learn more about other online/web office offerings, you can read a great summary article by ZDNet.

Google Docs – what can it do for you?
Initial reviews of Google’s offering were expected in that they focused on the limited capabilities of Google Docs when compared with the existing Micorsoft Office suite.  I’ll be the first to admit that on a feature by feature basis and also on total capabilities, Microsoft Office is still the defacto leader and standard.  No arguments.  But I’m sure that most people don’t use many of the features that are packed into Microsoft Office – I bet that most people don’t even know that many features even exist!  Even as a power user, I don’t use all of the features in Word, or Excel, or Outlook.  I regularly use PowerPoint, but avoid many of the features to keep my presentations simple.  I only occasionally use Access.  There seems to be a disconnect between what is being offered with what people use.

Sure the features are limited, but Google Docs seems to excel at two things:  collaboration and access.  I just recently started using Google Docs to co-author a manuscript.  Honestly, I was amazed at how easy it was to work together in real time on the same document with my colleague who was in another city.  We were both astounded at just how easy it was to work together online.  In the past, working together meant passing Word documents back and forth, utilizing the "track changes" feature and hoping we were working on the same version.  Sure Word tries to reconcile different versions, but when you get more than one or two people passing around a document, the process just becomes far too cumbersome.  It sort of works if you work in series by passing it along to another person and then another, but if you send it out to a group – forget about it.  This was especially powerful because were still trying to develop our idea.

While we were using it, my colleague shared with me via our instant message/chat session:  "We’re editing a live document!  Word files are dead… The future is now".  I really couldn’t argue with him as my one experience working collaborativly on a document opened my eyes to just how kludgy passing files back and forth is.  Collaboration is just so easy now.  All I had to do was create a document and then send an electronic invitation – couldn’t be any easier.  We didn’t have to worry about having compatible versions of software or whether the person received the must up-to-date file.  It was all there, accessible via the browser from our location of choice.

I’m not abandoning Word or Microsoft Office by any means because it still is the standard.  What is likely to happen is that for me, I’ll do my content development using Google Docs and then export it to Word for formatting and submission – many academic journals explicitly require submissions in Word format.

Now what?
Even with my excellent experience with Google Docs, there are still some things that just aren’t "good enough" yet.  Two things come to mind:

1. Offline access:  You need to have an active connection to the Internet.  Working on a document when traveling becomes a bit more challenging if you can’t get a reliable connection.  However, Google may be trying to address this concept of working offline with online applications with their Google Gears project.
2. Advanced formatting & features:  If you need some advanced formatting or integration with some other applications, Google Docs doesn’t seem ready (yet).

Should Microsoft be worried?
So now that I’ve seen and used Google Docs, should Microsoft be worried?

Yes – and no.

As "the network becomes the computer" (i.e., "cloud computing"), the model of computing will undoubtably change.  I know that I’ve resisted using online applications for quite some time now, but even I’ve started to use web applications more.  In the long run, Microsoft needs to be concerned because Google is attacking the Office industry.  Sure, not everyone will jump ship immediately, but Google’s offering is improving continually and seems poised to disrupt this market.

In the short term, I think Microsoft will be okay because they are so entrenched in their space.  Open Office, while a great application, wasn’t able to make a dent in Microsoft’s stronghold because they tried to compete with Microsoft on the basis of cost, even though Open Office wasn’t as good.  Google comes in and competes on a different set of terms like ease of use, collaboration, and ease of access in addition to cost.

If Google gets its online access challenge solved, I think Microsoft will have some legitimate competition.  Right now, Google doesn’t offer enough of what people need for the vast majority of corporate clients.  The small businesses and users with simple requirements seem to be the first ones to jump onto the Google Docs bandwagon.  Sure seems like Google is following the classic disruptive innovation pattern to a T.  In all fairness, Microsoft isn’t standing still – Microsoft has released its own online offering – Office Live.  It will be interesting to see what happens to this product.  Can Microsoft leverage its dominance in the Office suite to maintain control of the online office space?

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