Sunday’s Times carried a very strong summation of the showdown between Google and Microsoft on the future of computing.
My summation of the summation: Do users need to have their applications and data local on their harddrive or in the cloud and accessed/shared through a web interface?
I am not a Google Apps user. I’ve tried their stuff and it hasn’t clicked. I am a gmail user, but am enslaved by corporate devotion to Lotus Notes. I use Thunderbird for POP mail. Microsoft Word is gaining value for one simple reason — off-line composition and editing of blog posts. Google’s iGoogle portal is very valuable.
See Damon Darlin’s sidebar to the Times piece about his month without Office. Pretty compelling.
If you get beyond any knee-jerk emotional allegiances, and look at the future of computing from the point of view of economic expediency, I’d have to predict the cloud model is inevitable. The implications for a PC company are profound in terms of product design and architecture — almost like a return to the disk-less PC movement of the mid-80s …..
“Microsoft Word is gaining value…”
as in, it is more valuable than it was before?
Yes — the usual criticisms of productivity apps being overburdened with features most users don’t need could be applied to Word 2007 except for one very very strong addition which is Word’s new blog composer/manager. Offline blogging is more important than I realized — plane blogging for one — due to the security of composing locally rather than in a wordpress window.
I’ve been a pretty devout Word user since the decline of good old XyWrite in the early 90s.
interesting. thanks for the clarification.
Microsoft Office with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint sells for $120 on Amazon. This is a program which you can install on a new computer when you get it. Thus, it can last for at least five years. $24/year ($2/month) doesn’t seem like that much money to spend for the standard, especially for someone who “processes words for a living.”
The package does not include Outlook 2007 but you can buy that seperately from Amazon for about $90.
There are some nice features in Word 2007 besides the new blogging features.
I like the fact that it dynamically shows you changes in font and style.
There are also some nice document review and comparison features.
Excel 2007 is multi-threaded so will run faster on the new dual core systems.
One major lesson with computers: it never pays to be penny wise and pound foolish.
Speaking of which. The newest edition of PC World has customer service reviews. For laptops, Apple and Lenovo again comes on top. Dell and HP users complain a lot. Things like better laptops and equipment and software may seem like they cost a lot more until you amortize the cost and realize how much pain in suffering you can go through if you don’t pay that additional small amount.