Google is doing this “no doubt .. to make the service more familiar to Microsoft Office users?”

Or is it just because their engineers are increasingly lacking any design imagination?

I think that the increasingly deeper integration with google gadgets opens up some neat possibilities for representing and relating documents, displaying data, etc.

I echo the sentiment in these comments stating that productivity of the team is the ultimate judge of whether these tools are valuable.

I think that the first company to come up with a serious solution that can either be bought as a service (their computers) or run as software (your computers) and can operate seamlessly between the two data repositories will ultimately prevail.

Maybe Google will eventually sell office appliance servers the way they do search appliance servers. Still I don’t think Google has decided whether they really want to compete in this space or just simply want influence things and loosen the grips of Microsoft to open things up a bit.

We use it more for quick notes, brain dumps and some excel files where we’re tracking project management.

Get some rest, you seem a bit cranky.

20 years ago who’da thunk we’d give employees laptops to run around with our “secure” data? Probably nobody.

Somehow this will all get worked out…think about it, Google’s not going to steal your data – they’ll be lawsuited into bankruptcy, and fast.

The bigger question is how will they police the cloud / keep hackers away. I guess in some ways that’s not different from keeping some corporate spy away from your dumpster (oracle) or stealing a CEO’s laptop in some way. Crooks will still exist.

The cloud can deliver productivity, and that’s why it will eventually become the standard. But we don’t know what the rules will be, I s’pose.

But, it probably won’t happen as quickly as the big proponents think, either.

For contracts, important docs, you can still use MS Office/OpenOffice. No one has Google Docs is enterprise ready NOW. In a few years time maybe, but we’ll have to see what they offer. For 5-10 people company, MS Office is likely to cost anywhere from £500 – £3000. Compare against Google which gives you backups and data security for free, looks like a good deal to me.

Don’t forget you can always export as pdf, which for archive/compliance/etc is a better format.

What you are also assuming is that having a bunch of networked computers, all of which can be compromised by a single individual, is somehow a less serious security risk than having a single core source which is reviewable by everyone… and including any edits that may occur (As Google stores revisions).

I personally think that a centralized source that is accessible only to those with clearance is far preferable to a decentralized source.

It is all in how Google decides to implement if they get to the point of needing to worry more about large corporate markets. Trust me, I think they can handle that task when it comes to it.

http://readersz...in-google-docs/

Hopefully when they finally add gears integration I will be able to use the one application online and offline – and never have to know the difference.

If you use google docs to do business and store and client information then chances are YOUR DOING SOMETHING VERY BAD AND ILLEGAL!

Im not going to waste my time explaining why you shouldn’t be doing that! If you’ve gone off and started using Google docs then you should of done your due dilligence and gotten lawyers to verify if you are indeed allowed to use it for your business purposes!

Good luck to those that do use it!

yeah its not perfect and its not a powerhouse, but it gets the job done 99.9% of the time and if you cannot see the trend, you are deluding yourself. and probably running a competitive company.

i haven’t lost any mail yet (can’t say that about outlook), my computer boots nearly instantly (can’t say that about outlook OR pc), I haven’t lost my *contacts* – but I can thank outlook for losing those for me several times. I can share documents for real, can’t really say that about windows. w google, every computer i go to has my docs on it… basic, basic stuff which i’m crippled without. going back to office tied to pc would be like poking out my eyes and tying my hands behind my back.

Microsoft has thousands upon thousands of patents. There’s a frickin’ full time librarian group at Microsoft that exists purely to CATALOG their patents for easy reference.

Lots of these patents are inherent in the design of word processing, spreadsheet, powerpoint / etc functionality.

So when does the Google “let’s just copy this stuff” free ride end? When MSFT actually feels threatened if they start installing a true desktop package or pro grade functionality?