http://osx.iuse...om/app/gmailapp

It lets Gmail seem like a regular application that just lives on the OS X dock.

1) Students don’t have to purchase expensive software to be on the same version as the school

2) Students can work anyplace they have an Internet connection, no worrying about having the right hardware or software at Mom’s house, Dad’s house or at the grand parents house.

3) It decreases the point of entry for students and teachers to enter the online collaboration world to $0.

4) The portal (http://portal.c...ohighschool.org) allows students to have access to the entire slate of tools availale to them in one easy to use spot.

5) Google has already hinted to a presentation tool like PowerPoint and may re-launch JotSpot as an integrated tool within Apps for your Domain. This would provide all of the tools a student needs to be successful at no cost to students and/or teachers.

Schools are glad to be finally reaping the benefits of the read/write web.

Bekanntlich hat Google vor ein paar Tagen Google Apps Premier Edition eingeführt. Das umfangreiche Paket kostet 50 US-Dollar pro User und Jahr.
Vielleicht eine interessante Alternative zu Microsoft Office – vor allem für kleinere Unternehmen…

(i) Google’s guarantee of 99.9% uptime. This does not mean 0.01% downtime. It means that Google is willing to back up the promises they make; and that, in the long run, will bring confidence to business. I’ve been frustrated once or twice about contacting my bank, after some years long relationship. But that frustration for their “downtime” does not necessarily mean changing provider.

(ii) The IT guys (that would be laughing in a comment above) should really be the first ones to start crying. This is more an attack on them than on MS, and in the economic inefficiency of every single company having to buy a bunch of servers, maintain those, update them, and of course hire hire and hire a bunch of expensive people to run email & calendaring.

(iii) To compare this to ms-office is to misunderstand the whole thing. It’s like saying an iPod can’t write songs; can’t compose music. The minor announcement that docs & spreadsheets were now integrated is not even close to the real issue. They are neat tools, great for collaboration. I can imagine a manager in the morning emailing people about some problem they face and the whole group putting their views on a doc, instead of emailing opinions and arguments back and forth and back and forth and back and forth; by the end of the day a collaborative effort brings up a rough sketch. That is a productivity gain.

(iv) The docs & spreadsheets integration is a MINOR issue. The MAJOR issue is that, soon, we should see blogger integration, google reader, a presentation-sharing tool, picasa web photos, wikis, and a whole lot more I don’t remember at this precise second. All of them improve productivity, and, when taken together, when a click away, and after people have learned how to use them, then the productivity boost is really huge.

To say that this is an attack on microsoft office and therefore it will fail, is, to me, very myopic, just like those iPod skeptics that thought “this thing will never sell”.

Yet, years from now, Ms-office might just be a tool for “polishing” up documents. Then again, not all documents need to be polished; and, moreover, other companies that integrate their offices with Google’s tools might just make it a whole lot better.

When thinking about tech, we can’t just think where it is; we need to think where it’s going. What the potential is. This thing today was of incredible historic proportions. Not because of what’s on offer–though the offer is already great; but because it will only get better. People will be more productive AND costs will be saved. Laugh as much as you want; but think again when you start to see big corporations jump into Google’s efforts, both to improve productivicty, and to save dozens of millions of bucks per year. The IT guys in the backrooms better get prepared.

–Linhares

http://www.capyblanca.com

“Google’s technological brilliance” Huh?

I’m not going to run though all the problems with many of GOOG’s half-assed products. Fact is, GOOG search sucks and isn’t making any progress.

- with 4000 PhDs the GoogleBot still can’t read an XML web page?
c’mon, that’s weak sauce. And it’s holding back innovation in websites.
Seriously, the “organizer of the world’s information” can’t actually READ
XML. Huh? Hey Fanboys: what do you say about that?

- despite “of 22M results” or whatever crap they display, you can never see more than 1,000 results. For any search. Ever. Q: Why does it matter if there are 22M results, if you will only show me 1000? A: GOOG is misleading you. You can’t ever get to 1001–so sorry, long tail. Fanboys: now tell me 1000 is a lot. And I will tell you thanks, but I would like more than 0.000045% of the available results. Especially when 500 of the 1000 results are splogs.

Marshall, is this “technological brilliance” or merely “less sucky than others (who do not focus on search)”?

I posit that Google’s revenue growth is completely proportional to their search getting worse. Ooops. Human-inserted ads are better than pagerank. Oh oh.

Now, I’m no MS fanboy either, but they’re not getting credit for all the hard work they do.

On a whim, I went to open a doc from my atty in Google Docs today. But sorry, it doesn’t support “redlining” — MSOffice or OpenOffice do. G-Fans will say “yeah but how many people need that?”

It’s simple: we need more than pagerank’s easily gamed algorithm, we need more than 1000 results per search term. We need more features thank GDocs.

It used to be that I would read article after article saying “who needs bookmarks when you have Google? It’s easier to find it with Google than it is to save it.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Google Search has gotten worse over the last 5 years, not better. And no one can dispute that.

Don’t be a fanboy of anyone–don’t make excuses for them. If their product doesn’t get the job done, demand better. In my view, GOOG search has only gotten worse, never better. Does anyone really believe otherwise?

The figure of 99.9% sounds great, until you compare it to something like the phone company. The vast, vast majority of people and businesses do not suffer as much as 8.74 hours of downtime a year. A lot of people hate phone companies, but their reliability is pretty incredible.

Thanks. It’s nice to see other people who are open minded and not Googlefied.

It seems like the SaaS media relationships departments have been busy since last night. Microsoft and BT are talking about BT Application Marketplace, Salesforce is hingting about its 25,000 user customer and Google is in fanfarre-mode with Apps Premie…

http://arstechn...70125-8707.html

People who in controls of these computers have a new business model too. They now can black mail corporations that use GApps to distrub their businesses (hmm, especially during sensitive earning report preparation period)..

Also, whats strange is that the google talk feature in google apps is worthless because it won’t communicate with gmail users.

A lot of these Office 2.0 offerings need to think more about their distribution. If you’re on the web, you can deal with HTML content only. It’s far better to have a strategy related to web-content than a strategy related to Office content.

Just my 2 cents.

For enterprises I would have expected this to have been rolled out as part of Google OneBox, their turn-key search appliance. That gets around the security issues because everything lives behind the enterprises firewall. Of course they may be working on that as well making the whole hosted offering a Time-to-Market play.

-Steve