google docs

I’m really excited for some reason with Google Docs. It may be because it’s extremely easy and fast enough to not worry about software but it’s probably because I’m sold on the “software on-demand” hype going around. I’m really anticipating the mash-ups that would be coming from GDocs, since they announced they’d open their API of docs and spreadsheets. I wonder if Google will even attempt a Powerpoint replacement and then there’s Google Base which isn’t a full DB solution which I currently see Sf doing so well.

Blog

October 13

Comments

 

About the Author, Dan Cameron:

I'm the owner and solution engineer at Sprout Venture, a web solutions company that specializes in web development including WordPress.

I started my first blog in 2003 and transitioned to WordPress in 2004. Since moving to WordPress I've written a few plugins and themes for public consumption. Lately I'm busy engineering/building/coding and have only been able to share a few code snippets.

If you're in need of some web development, web design or custom WordPress plugins and/or themes contact me, I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

Read More »

  • I'm not too sold on online web 2.0 apps yet. While I think it's pretty cool, and it might suffice for some light work... the lag in online apps is very painful at home. Just a long excel list takes quite some time to scroll through, and the latency is very apparent.

    I do hope this improves to the point of general usabilty. For home use, why do I need any type of office suite... I see this as a very nice thing to promote on the uber budget PC. Altho, for a pure word processor, abiword is hard to beat.
  • Powerpoint (or the equivalent) will be interesting, since there are some things you just can't do with a pure web app yet. If they were to come up with one, a mashup I might try would be a wrapper app (no this isn't a joke, since there would actually be a point to it) that would allow the show to be displayed on an alternate monitor but still have a control UI on the primary monitor. This is something I don't think they could do just with browser technology alone.

    As for a database type app, I don't see Google Base as being in that category, since I think it's more about just publishing content, not necessarily serving the same purpose as database applications. I don't see them going after the larger, full featured web DB system, since there are already so many large competitors out there in the market, almost all of which require some level of customization to be used on a large scale.

    They could go after the basic small DB market (currently served by the likes of Access, etc.), but then again, you could argue that that's kind of what things like Ruby On Rails are already going after: simple, quick DB apps with an easy UI on top. Google could possibly wrap up this kind of thing and abstract away all the remaining tech details (building a data model, etc.) behind a nicer setup UI, and probably just make the UI configuration generic and functional enough to work with 80-85% of the users. I'm sure there are probably other players going after something like this as well, but I'm not aware of any major ones that Google wouldn't trounce if they did something like this.
blog comments powered by Disqus