Dennis L Hitzeman's world of science and technology
 
 

December

Posted at December 27, 2010 by

I like a lot of things about Google, especially the company’s  constant attempts to push the envelope and change how we think about using computers and the web. Unfortunately, I also dislike Google for some of the same reasons because the company’s attempts to push that envelope are single minded and, sometimes, ill-conceived.

From my point of view, the problem Google has as a company is that its heart and soul lives in Silicon Valley, where internet access is cheap and ubiquitous and where everyone is writing code for the next big web sensation. I think that the company doesn’t understand that more than half the population of the United States does not live in Silicon Valley, or even a major city, and that the solutions they preconceive will not necessarily work in, say, rural Ohio.

For example, I would love to be able to use Google Documents as a regular part of the tools I use to create, write, document, and explore. My problem is that Google Docs is only online, in the cloud, and decidedly under Google’s control. I don’t have ubiquitous web access where I live, so having documents locally resident is a must. Further, I need to know that, if something terrible happens out there on the web, I still have control of what I have created.

What Google needs to understand, then, is that there are users who would use their products if Google solved the problem in a different way. I would use Google Docs a lot more than I do if it had a locally resident interface with locally stored files that I could easily manipulate offline whenever I needed to then synchronize with the cloud when I decide to.

Google already has a version of this same technology built into its Chrome browser in the form of its bookmarks synchronization tool. All I am looking for is something that takes the same idea one step further and applies it to the rest of Google’s tools.

Until then, Google Docs, and really the rest of Google’s impressive array of tools, will continue to be a nifty form of file replication with editing capabilities for me, and I suspect, a lot of other people.

DLH

 
 
 
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