Even though so far people are still using offline application much more often, not that long time is left before we all will switch to online applications. It's all there: internet infrastructure, necessary applications, reliable storage that offer volumes far more than enough for normal users. Same happened several years ago with offline mail programs: when did you connect to Gmail with your laptop over POP3 through port 110 last time? Or POP3 doesn't even say you anything? Yes, we all still use outlook and lotus notes for our corporate mails - but that's just a matter of time.
Going back to online office applications. There are lots of online applications out there: WorkSpace, HyperOffice, Zoho, Thinkfree and lots of others. Thankfully at least Apple is not playing this game - but its 2 major competitors do. And they are very ambitious about their products. Over the last years both MS's Live.com and Google Apps had added pretty powerful online office tools. And although so far companies are just in process of finding right business models - meaning both behemoths artificially limit functionality of their apps (Google for the sake of Google Apps and MS for the sake of offline apps) - it seems once they figure out the right way of charging people for their products, they will be able to make another small internet revolution (actually part of ongoing claudization process).
So now it's a good time to choose what system you will stick to and don't judge so quick MS's products - they are indeed very close competitors with Google. So here is the list of major differences I see in both systems:
- Storage: MS - 25Gb and Google - ~6Gb (do you have 25Gb of docs on your laptop (with no pics)? I doubt.
- Format support: MS is pushing hard (way too hard) its failed *.docx format while Google is as usually maximum user-friendly with handful number of formats supported
- Editing: with Live you can easily edit your docs using your offline Word/Excel/MS Whatever and then the docs will be automatically saved in web - as you might guessed no such a sexy feature to purely internet giant Google
- Reliability: have you seen blue screen of death while using MS? Be prepared - that does happen even with their online apps - not exactly the screen, but the system is indeed buggy - but MS is famous for fixing their products for long years - so wait until Live 2016 if you are really cared about full system stability
- Version history: this feature is quite useful if you use online office and MS here can boast the best realization from all online systems I've seen
- Interface: yes, I hate new MS Office, moreover I've killed office 2007 by installing office 2010 and then killed the last one with office 2003 on my netbook, but nevertheless we all got used to MS Office overloaded interface and after it Google's simplicity seems a bit awkward and intuitively hard to use. Perhaps that's the major reason MS decided to keep exactly the same interface for their online apps.
This post was unusually long, although it's point is pretty straightforward: the world is indeed moving towards clouds and online office is one of inevitable parts of this process. So whether you are proponent of Google, or MS - you can start getting used to this new experience. And since it's the last post, I want to say what I always willing to express:
No comments:
Post a Comment