Mining Your 1,984 Digital Streams [UPDATED!]

Now, I'm no conspiracy theory lunatic (although I did enjoy Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK), and I'm not one of those hyper-paranoid-the-government-is-out-to-get-you types - but with more and more of our data being stored and shared "on the web", "in the cloud"... (insert your favorite phrase here) things are slowly lining up for a 1984-esqe senario. You know 1984... as in "Nineteen Eighty Four", the novel written in 1948 by George Orwell.

Could You Live Your (Computing) Life Only In The Cloud?

So the first batch of Chrome OS computers started shipping this week - one by Samsung and one by Acer. They're basically like a standard laptop, albeit an under-powered one - think netbook specs. They both have about a 12 inch screen, weigh under 3.5 pounds (1.6 kg), have a couple of gigs of RAM, a solid state 15-20GB hard drive, a SD card reader, couple of USB ports (no ethernet), built-in WiFi (no ethernet - but Samsung has a 3G radio option) and a built-in webcam/microphone. They both retail for about $350 (WiFi only) to $500 (WiFi + 3G).

Office 2010 - Who Cares?

Well, Microsoft is supposed to launch a limited preview of their upgrade to Office - called Office 2010 - sometime today. I didn't pre-sign-up for an access code to check it out - because, quite frankly, I really don't care.

Curious, yes - caring - no.

I read an overview on TechCrunch and they menti0ned that Microsoft was going to come out with a FREE version of Office on the web - in direct competition with Google Docs.

Ummmmm... yeah.

The good news is that it's rumored to have the same crappy and confusing "Ribbon" user interface as the desktop version (!), and although it won't have as many features (of course) - it will still allow you to actually create... wait for it... TEXT DOCUMENTS IN THE "BROWSER"! Whoo hoo!

Oh, and they're also going to give away this spiffy new version of Excel that allows you to actually do simple spreadsheets - again - IN THE "BROWSER"! Wow!

Jeez. Are they kidding?

I mean I know that they hate Google and everything - and Google must have gone up their a** 100 miles when they announced the Chrome OS last week - but really. A free Office Suite? 4 years after Google did it? 4 years after Zoho and all the rest of the OTHER 1,000,000 players who have free word processing, image processing, spreadsheets and presentation software?

If anything, Microsoft's delay in giving away the goods has allowed all these other players to get people used to NOT using Microsoft's Office tools (in the browser). They have all made it easy to import and export their browser-based documents for consumption by Office or OpenOffice or PDF or whatever it is you use on your desktop.

They allow multiple authors to collaborate in near-realtime, support version control, and permission-based security. Oh yeah, and these "other" productivity tools run in any browser you might have lying around - NOT just in IE.

They also (for the most part) have open APIs - that allow developers to tie these applications into larger workflow applications - or to combine the data and create custom mashups. I'm sure that Microsoft will have some APIs as well - but it will be interesting to see whether they extend to the desktop version as well.

In some ways, it's cool that the 800 pound gorilla is getting into the free online business apps market. Maybe that competition will force Google and the other players to up the ante and create some truly innovative features (and enhance some of the stuff that's in there now).

I'm not sure what their business model for the free web versions is (other than the typical Microsoft FUD-factor)... because if you're not using Office now (or have an old version that meets your needs and you're using some other online tools as well) - what will make people jump to the online versions?

The other big question is - how long until someone creates a virus or worm that will infect the Active X components that will surely play a part? Will they run on other browsers? Will users of other browsers need to install anything? Will users even CARE?

Will YOU use the free Office tools when they finally ship (late next year)?

Google Be Nimble

I just love it when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, opens his mouth in public. He nearly always says something that is either outrageous, stupid, embarrassing - or all of the above.

This week was no different. He was doing a webcast interview at the Gartner symposium (the equivalent of their "user's conference) and if you watch the video - about 24 minutes into it he tries to completely dismiss Google Apps saying it's not even in the same league as Office.

He cites one example: "you can’t even put a footnote in a document." And, that was the case. Until two days later.

Yep, Google added that feature and rolled it out to its more than 1 million users within 48 hours of his comment.

Nice!

On one hand you have the largest software company in the world - one that is battling the irrelevancy question of their operating system by throwing money at it - and here's another huge software company with a pure SaaS (Software as a Service) offering that is just proving that they're more nimble and in touch with customers while at the same time proving that Microsoft isn't.

You just gotta' love it. I mean really. If that wasn't the biggest bitch slap I've seen in a while - it was close.

The other bitch slap came this weekend while I was watching some prime time TV. I got a glimpse of the new Apple "I'm a Mac" ad - this one feature our dynamic duo - but this time PC is wearing an accountant hat and counting money into two piles - one for "advertising" (with an enormous stack of cash) and one for "development" that has a tiny pile of cash.

Ooops. Looks like poor little Microsoft is getting picked on by the "little" guys - big time. There was a time not too long ago that no one would dare take on Microsoft (at least that publicly) for fears that Microsoft would just buy them and kill their technology.

As Microsoft gets ready to debut Windows 7 (which Steve admitted is Vista [again] - but "better") - they better get this one right because it seems that the world is getting to be a pretty competitive place where just the mention of "Microsoft" doesn't carry the same weight as it once did.

OpenOffice + Google = Office Killer

I think Google should step up and create a tight integration with OpenOffice. I mean, they've done this (mainly marketing spin) integration with Salesforce.com - and the press ate it up like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I mean, really people! Webservices these days are not that huge of a western deal - and given that Salesforce is a web application, it's not exactly rocket science to integrate the two.

Where things get a little more sticky is with traditional applications. Applications people use every day to generate real world work stuff - like word processors, spreadsheet and presentations. Google gives you a free way with Docs. OpenOffice gives you (an arguably) full-featured suite that frees users from the MS Office choke hold.

Discuss.

What's in it for Google? Selling support. Bashing MS in the good eye. Driving people to adopt OpenOffice so they can finally just switch to Ubuntu and leave that crappy Vista in the dust. Adding actual, paying users of Docs at an enterprise level. Selling more storage. Selling email hosting. Driving mobile users to a slimmed down, mobile-Internet-data-package-burning way to use Docs on the road, and OpenOffice when they land - seamlessly.

Where's the proof that any of that would even happen? IBM is giving it a shot by announcing a couple of days ago that it was selling support for its free Symphony Office-like suite. Plus, I think they have a couple of guys there that can probably do it over morning coffee - after all, Google gives them all 20% of their time to "try stuff out" on their own.

There's even a free OpenOffice plug-in that will give them a roadmap and a headstart. Written by Polish engineer Przemysław Rumik, the OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs plug-in (yeah, it's not the most elegant name ever) will export and import your documents to and from Google Docs and Zoho. Did I mention it's free?

Google - meet Przemyslaw... Prezemyslaw - Google. And Prezemyslaw, just in case they don't call you - here's some openings at Google Poland... Szczęście!

Is SaaS That's Pretty Better Than Pretty SaaS?

Adobe launched Acrobat.com earlier in the week - signaling they are throwing their hat into the online Office-like, pseudo-Office-killer arena. I just had to take a look for myself.

The thing is all based in Flash, as you might expect - and it makes a very good first impression. The screen is dark grey (almost black) - and the icons are pretty (one would hope that a company like Adobe could make stuff look nice).

You can basically do 5 things - use Buzzword - their online word processor, use ConnectNow, create a PDF, share files, and view your own files. Hmmmm... the ConnectNow thing sounds cool - and it's free (for now) - but the word processor, creating a PDF and sharing files - I can do now (and DO now) on Google Docs.

So, I started with the stuff I'm used to using on Google Docs - the word processor. The first thing you notice is "loading"... and "loading"... then some more "loading". Once the thing is loaded - it looks very pretty. It has all the swooshing and wooshing you would expect in a Flash-based app. The controls are minimal, but you can set the fonts (font, size, color, bold, etc), paragraph stuff (alignment, etc), list functions (number, ordered and bullet), image control (adds an image), table control, comment control and a way for you to see your existing files.

OK - that's the good news. The bad news is - it's 15,000 clicks to do anything. You see, rather than just have a "normal" toolbar at the top where you can do a single click - these area icons swoosh to the left to activate, and they collapse whatever else it was that you were working with.

For example, if you are looking at the font stuff, and want to add a table, you click the little table icon and the whole toolbar swooshes to the left, collapsing the font stuff, and only showing the table stuff. OK. So, then you click the add table and it adds a 2 row, 2 column table. Good.

Now, you want to type something - and format the text. So, typing, typing - want to change the font color. Oops. Going to toolbar (that I would have to do anyway) - click font - SWOOSH - away go the table controls and the font stuff appears.

WTF?

One thing that I absolutely LOVE about it - is the table control. FINALLY someone was smart enough to put little "+" icons on all the rows that allow you to add or remove the row visually. Plus, when you select a row or column there is an icon that turns into a menu that will allow you to insert/delete etc. right inline. KUDOS to Adobe for this innovation. I just hope EVERYONE copies it.

The other interesting thing is that there is the ability to comment on every line - and you can see comments from others - but it's not as flexible as being able to leave a "floating" comment. They've got a couple of cool features in there - the color picker is by "family" of color (basics, greys, beach, brights, earthtones, forest, hot, jewels, tones) - but you can't get your own custom color; and they have a nifty little dialog for inserting high ASCII characters that pretty cool.

It saves fairly quickly, and exports to PDF , Word, RTF, HTML (in ZIP format), and plain text. It would only import .doc or .txt files (no support for OpenOffice) and it spawned a new window to do the import. And guess what - you "get to" watch: Loading... loading... loading... again. HUH?

After playing and importing I "let it rest" and came back to it this morning - thinking that the annoyances of the slow loading and slow-ish performance would "settle" overnight.

Nope.

I'm still just as annoyed as I was yesterday/last night. I'm so wary of the word processor that I'm not going to try out the online screen sharing right now (although I'm sure it's pretty as well!).

I'm writing this back in good ol' (more ugly but MUCH more functional) Google Docs. I here's the lessons that I've learned:

• All show and no go really IS all show and no go
• Sexy-looking apps that don't function well - won't be used. Ever.
• Simplicity and elegance is much more than skin deep
• Swooshing is cool only the first time
• Try to make controls easier to use (like the table control) by asking the question "How would my mom do it?"
• When push comes to shove - easy is better sexy