Those who know me a bit might know that I sell Google Apps as one of the many interest in business. Lately however I find that I cannot seriously sell Google Docs and expect them to use google docs to replace Microsoft Office. Google docs might just be good for doing simple documents and nothing more than that.
I say that for a few reasons:
1. Documents cannot exceed 50k. Now if an organization were to depend on Google docs entirely how is it able to do some serious document work if it has this limitation?
2. For simple formatting google docs is superb. In fact I like it so much I tried living of it exclusively for a little while until I found that for real work like doing quotes and invoicing you had to know html to edit the templates. Now how can you expect a company's secretary or the admin staff to know how to edit html?! Fail! Complete utter fail!
3. There is no way to password protect a document easily. Now I do not need comments telling with a webpage detailing the hows of doing this across a few pages of hacking. The point here is that it cannot be done by customers so it's a fail.
Until these issues are solved or at least worked around, google don't even expect to be able to dislodge Microsoft Office. Infact, looking at the technical challenges that you have to surmount, I am beginning to think that it might not even be worth the fight.
As for now I will continue to sell my services configuring Google Apps but I will concentrate more on pushing the email and the Calendaring.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
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3 comments:
You might be interested in checking out the software package "Opengoo". It's also not going to kill office anytime soon, but it *is* fantastic. I use it daily for task lists, document sharing and calendaring.
How about you get them to use OpenOffice.org 3.1 instead?
1. "Docs: Each doc can have a maximum size of 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image."
2. You don't have to use the existing templates. Any document can become a template by opening it and using 'Save as a new copy'. Plus the existing templates I've played with seemed perfectly modifiable & extensible from within Docs' wysiwyg editor, I never had to drop down to the HTML.
3. What would password-protected documents provide that the current controlled sharing between users doesn't?
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