Is Google Ready To Take On Microsoft And The World
For many years, the “hip” thing to do (at least for Mac and Linux users), has been to bash Microsoft. Some did it because of security concerns related to Windows. Others did it because of perceived business ethics violations, while others did it… honest because. The argument I heard most often was that Microsoft just wanted to procure into your life. They didn’t care how they did it, they didn’t care what the cost was… they just wanted to rule every section of your computing life.
I don’t hear the same arguments against Google. I’m not saying people should be saying the same thing, but it occurred to me the other day that Google may unbiased be on the verge of getting exactly what Microsoft has always wanted.
Total World Domination.
Well, maybe that’s going a little too far, but maybe not as far out as you’d think at first.
For instance I’m not writing this article in a desktop text editor or word processor, or even in the Associated Content web form. In fact, I’m not writing this in a desktop application at all. I’m writing it in my web browser, via Google’s online Docs & Spreadsheets application. Docs & Spreadsheets, which is now part of Google Apps (a commercial product available for businesses), which is still available for free, albeit without the phone support offered corporate buyers.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets offers, as the name might suggest, both word processing and spreadsheet options. The word processing looks very mighty like what you might expect to see when filling out an online form. You have some formatting ability, such as courageous, italics and underline. You can also settle from a variety of fonts, such as Ariel, Ariel Unlit, Ariel Narrow, Book Antiqua, Century Gothic, Funny Sans MS, Courier New, Garamond, Georgia, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS and Verdana. For those of you keeping track at home, those are the infamous Microsoft Core Fonts. Originally made available for free download from Microsoft’s website (in order to help standardize web fonts and give web developers a set of fonts “everyone” would have), the fonts are no longer freely available from Microsoft. However, the original license made them free as long as clear requirements were met (original license left intact and the form of the archive not changed), and it is my assumption that those requirements have been met by Google. The importance of those fonts being available to Google users, of course, is not to be exaggerated. There is no guarantee that some computer users (especially Linux users), actually have those fonts, or that Microsoft or Mac users have standard Linux fonts. Because Google Docs & Spreadsheets has them available, a user can be very confident his document will arrive at its destination looking relatively terminate to what he intended.
In addition to basic formatting and fonts, Google Docs & Spreadsheets also offers the ability to change a font’s color, as well as highlight certain words or phrases in a variety of colors. HTML links can be added, and lists (both numbered and unnumbered) are also supported. Text can be left, right or full justified, as well as centered, and users are also offered a wealth of style options to choose from. Since this is a web application, it may be accessed anywhere one has a computer and Internet connection. This leads to the feature of having multiple people edit the document. Simply click the “Collaborate” tab, and whomever is sent an invitation will have access to this document. This feature makes sharing documents a snap. There is no need to send the document to a collaborator, simply send the invitation and the document itself is waiting there, always available.
And what will I do when I’m done with the document? I can print it, of course. I can email it (a process made incredibly easy if using Gmail, of course!), I can get a preview of it as if it was a web page, or I can save the document. Google Docs offers pleasant options, such as rich text, Microsoft Word, html (zipped), OpenOffice, or PDF. Any of these translations is nearly flawless, and fast. Simply choose your format and within seconds the document is waiting for you on your desktop, or wherever your browser is set to download.
Is Google Docs ready to take on Microsoft Word in a head-to-head battle? Not even close. Microsoft Word offers so many more options for formatting, graphics, tables, mail merge, etc, etc, etc…. but Google Docs is good. Very good.
Now, we were talking about Total World Domination, and obviously that can’t just be done with an online word processor and spreadsheet application, no matter how good they are. So, what else does Google have to offer? Well, a lot.
I mentioned Gmail, and what a great program that is! Introduced on April Fool’s Day of 2004, Gmail was initially view to be a hoax, as it offered, according to the press release, a burly Gigabyte of storage, an amount unheard of at the time! Yahoo Mail, the leading free email provider at the time (and still to this day), offered storage measured in a handful or two of Megabytes, and suddenly Google was offering many times as mighty. It almost seemed too good to be true.
Since the initial inaugurate, Google has continued to add features (and storage space), go Gmail. Users of Gmail now have 2.8 Gigabytes of storage for their email, and the number increases by the second. In addition, Gmail can now be used to check a user’s POP mail accounts, and to send via that account. For users with multiple accounts, this is a marvelous feature. Simply enter in the contact information for that anecdote, and Google presents your unusual messages to you all in the same inbox. Then when replying, hit “reply” like normal, and Google replies using the address the email was originally sent to.
Along with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Gmail, Google is constantly adding programs that integrate and expand their offerings. Google Talk is such a program, as is Google Calendar.
Google Talk is, as the name would suggest, a chat client, like AIM or MSN or Yahoo. Instead of using one of those proprietary, commercial programs, however, Google went another direction, and settled on the open-source Jabbar client. Sure, the official Google Talk client doesn’t ever say it’s a Jabber client, but it is. And since there is currently no official client available for Mac or Linux users, for those not wanting to chat via the web browser extension, any client that supports the Jabber protocol (such as Fire or Adium for Mac, or Gaim or Kopete for Linux), will do the trick.
Google Calendar is Google’s scheduling and calendar application. Events can be entered into the calendar, alarms and notifications set, and the calendar published or made available for others to view. It can import other, pre-existing calendars, including those in iCal’s or Outlook’s format. This makes sharing schedules and events with other users incredibly easy. As far as integration, when a Gmail user receives an email that has a Google Calendar event in it, the program is aware of that, and offers to add the event to the person’s calendar.
One other web program from Google that has me excited is Google Reader. One of my favorite things to do at the computer is check up on all the news feeds and blogs I read. There are probably 20-25 of them I’m keeping up on at any one time, and if I had to visit each site individually, it would take far too long to be worth the inconvenience. Enter RSS and Atom feeds, and Google Reader. RSS and Atom are two formats of syndicating content in a super, efficient manner, and Google Reader is Google’s answer to standalone programs. Google Reader is actually my RSS/Atom reader of choice at the moment, because it’s on whatever computer I’m on, so I don’t need to pains about reading a feed in one place, then having it show up as new at another. When I go attend and forth from my place to visit relatives, my blog list is always current. Google Reader has a slightly different viewing format from other readers, but after getting used to the differences between it and a customary 3-pane email client style, I’ve found Google Reader to easily be my favorite way to read blogs.
A new Google App that maybe isn’t quite ready for prime time is Google Page Creator. Yep, if you want to make a web page, Google has an application for that as well, and web based to boot! From professional to hip, Google Page Creator has quite a few templates and layouts to allow a user to quickly throw together a web page. Is the page exactly the same as what could be done with a professional program? Not even close. But for someone who just has a few things to say, or a few pictures to share, Google Page Creator is easy and swiftly.
Finally, there’s why we first learned of Google: search engine. According to SearchEngineWatch.com, Google held nearly a 50 percent marketshare in February of 2007, leading second-place Yahoo by nearly 20 percentage points. And in looking at the two websites, it’s no wonder, at least to this viewer, exactly why Google is so much more approved. It isn’t necessarily that Google gets better results. It isn’t that it’s faster. In fact, the results I got for a few standard searches were nearly identical, and took about the same amount of time to come up. No, Google is so popular because its website is so clean and easy to expend.
Just go to Google and look how simple that pages looks. Then go to Yahoo and see if you can notice the same simplicity. Of course you can’t. Yahoo is a astronomical kaleidoscope of colors and pictures and ads, and… it’s just busy. Google, on the other hand, gives the user the impression of a single purpose. There is only one thing to look at when you go to Google. Only one input box, and the cursor is already there, fair waiting for you to input your search term.
In addition, Google search is everywhere. If you use Safari or Camino or Firefox or Konqueror or Opera, chances are really good that there’s a search bar right beside the address bar in your web browser. Sure, most browsers give you the option to change that, but if I had to guess, I’d say the percentage of people who actually do that is… very very tiny. It reminds me of a myth told by Richard Feynman, a world-famous scientist. He was working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. In his words, Los Alamos, in spite of the secrecy surrounding the project, was so isolated it was boring. He took to playing pranks on his fellow scientists. He realized that of these scientists, all of them in dire need of secrecy, roughly a quarter never changed the factory settings on their office safes, so Feynman started opening the safes and leaving them notes, as if Los Alamos had a spy.
The point is this: if scientists working on the development of the atomic bomb couldn’t be bothered to change the factory settings of their safes, how likely are computer users to change the search engine settings on their browser? Not very!
And that, in a nutshell, could be what is keeping Google from Total World Domination. Right now, Microsoft is too entrenched. It is on our computers, in our minds, and just a fraction of our everyday lives. At the moment, there is little to push anyone to abandon Microsoft. But think about what is available… right now… from Google. You can write your documents, piece appointments, make web pages, email friends, chat online, search for information, and read news. All with web applications from Google. Is it only a matter of time before these free applications start making headway against Microsoft’s current near-monopoly. Only time will tell.
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Filed under Microsoft Small Business Phone by on Oct 27th, 2010. 