Steve "Footnote" Ballmer in denial over Google Docs

Stan Beer
Monday, 20 October 2008 07:24

Opinion and Analysis

In fact that is the attraction of Google Docs. It fits the needs of 90% of the population who use a word processor.

The menu is uncluttered and easy to understand. It doesn't give you a lot of choice of fonts - fine I'll go with what I can get. It saves things automatically - I never lose work anymore. And it's very fast.

I can access my documents from any computer in the world that has an Internet connection. If I really need to save a document to work on offline (and I rarely do), I can save it to any basic word processor or more advanced ones, including OpenOffice and Word.

Perhaps the best thing of all about Google Docs, however, is its collaboration capabilities. It is so easy to share documents with other members of the iTWire team - all I need are their email addresses and at the push of a button my document is now everyone's document.

In case anyone thinks I'm just talking about word processing, then let me set you straight. I, as medium-level office productivity user, have successfully replaced all my desktop based office productivity applications with Google Apps.

I no longer use the Outlook email or calendar clients. I use Gmail and Google Calendar, both of which, like Google Docs, are not as feature rich as their Outlook equivalents but for me they're fine. And once again, I'm not tied to any particular computer.

A colleague recently collaborated to put together some presentation slides for iTWire using Google Presentations. Once again, it's more basic than PowerPoint but it was just so easy to collaborate, get the thing together, download it to a PDF file and present it to a prospective client.

There are of course a couple of issues.

Most long time users have a lot of legacy stuff tied up in Microsoft Office files. Fine keep those for when you need them, just do all your new stuff in Google Apps.

Then of course are those pesky emails you get from users who insist on sending Microsoft Office attachments, including those in the Word 2007 .docx format. If you don't want to spend the money on Office 2007, download a copy of OpenOffice 3.0, which now recognises .docx documents.

It's obvious that many businesses which exchange documents with other businesses will still need to use Microsoft Office. However, sooner or later they will come to realise that there is a better, cheaper and more efficient way of doing things. Isn't that what all businesses want?