Memo 10: Google Docs - Sensible?

This blog talks about the concept of online desktop publishing, and in particular Google Docs. What that basically means is the creation of content, primarily word processing and spreadsheet formats based on a ubiquitous platform that is easily distributed and shared among the cyber community.

With this in mind, the aim of Google docs is to facilitate the storage or creation of content in a manner in which a user, or several users may contribute to the creation of various documents in a real time format from geographically diverse locations. Great, so how does it all work, well each user would need internet access with a basic amount of bandwidth, a browser, that has “Ajax” capability. In case your wondering, Ajax is the reason why the Gmail interface feels a lot more alive, because the page is capable of polling a source automatically, as compared to other web based mail interfaces like for example Hotmail in which the user has to refresh a page manually in order to determine whether any changes have occurred to the inbox. The usage of Ajax is not really a big deal though because most browsers come with Ajax support. Which adds adds more comfort to the way the interface handles changes that are made dynamically, among several users.

There are several micro-benefits to Google docs, users may know who is online and who has access to each document that is available. There is also access and user discrimination, in that some documents are set to have read-only access and others are open for editing. The same goes for users, some may view others may edit. So that’s great, so how does it really hold up compared to standard offline publishing? Well for starters the first thing that people note is the limited range of functions as compared to an offline version. This include basic level functions such as the limited range of fonts, or margin manipulations and extends into some greyer areas that co-incide with rights management and regulatory concerns. Examples include, why one cannot upload another extremely popular format, built on the concept of cross-platform ubiquity and mobile access, and that is the “pdf” format. Most technical documents use pdf’s for several reasons, to do with data scalability and document security, so why have Google not considered this?

All in all, I do believe I the benefit of having a tool like Google docs is great, particularly in small scale operations, but what is the final vision that Google has, full scale competition to offline distributed systems? Perhaps, perhaps not, sorry but there are just too many factors influencing my verdict this time, like for instance the power of parallel processing, which plays into the servers managing the functions of online applications like Google Docs. Parallel processing might be given a boost in the upcoming future by the enhancements that the emerging “ballistic transistor” technology brings with it. Its set to make a fairly big splash in the processor world, and all of this will benefit online applications that may compete better in this “thiner” framework. But as far as I am concerned, the internet has always been shy of being reliable, and for that reason or the lack of much better choices I would still prefer Microsoft’s suite of desktop publishing products, for the sake of reliability and functionality.