Living on Google Apps
Michael Calore, a Wired news editor, recounts his month long sojourn into the world of web applications away from the world of traditional desktop applications. Makes for interesting reading and allows one to gauge to an extent if web apps are ready for prime time.
While his overall experience sounds great, he does raise a couple of very valid points about the viability (and areas of improvement) of web applications in general and Goggle Apps in general.
1. Interoperability: Ideally we should be moving into a world where open standard would make this word a redundant issue. However considering the length of time we have stuck to our closed boxes (read desktop applications) this is going to be a major pain in the a*#. Web applications being new would need to integrate into the historical apps rather than them adhering to standards. This would become important in large organizations and groups.
2. Security: Michale talks about the fears people have regarding the security of their data. Sadly, it seems to me that Google is playing down those fears as being invalid. Yes, we do not understand how the current desktop applications work. And yes, they do have security loop holes. But the scepter of all my data lying around in the data center open to anyone with admin access on the Google data center in scary. And then I really do not know what Google is doing with my data. And since it has all my data it becomes much easier to target me. I am not saying they are valid fears, but they are genuine fears that consumers have and Google and others like Zoho attempting to wean away people from desktop applications have to understand and ameliorate.
3. User Experience Paradigm: Again, I see here Google trying to play down the nature of the problem. If web application suites are to make money by themselves (for Google this might very well not be the case), they better take this into account. The people deciding things in an organization will be the ones tied to the desktop metaphor and they will be loath to change their styles and the young turks entering might find it better to adapt to the desktop metaphor rather than fight for the validity of the using the web application style of doing things. They would have, I am sure, other important battles to fight.
However, Michael’s experiment has demonstrated that Web Apps do present a viable alternative to small groups and organizations where everyone is committed to using the same platform. Personally, I have almost shifted to the web for email and chat. The office suite however remains solidly in place.
