Google Office Apps: Not for Everyone

I just finished reading Mike Elgan's article in Datamation on the new Google Office moves. The Goog has been busier than just about anyone this past month, managing to aggravate people from Beijing all the way West to Cupertino in a relatively short time.

First, a rollout of some new mostly-integrated and improved apps (Mail/Buzz/Reader/Wave) with an audacious plan to provision every user on Day One with "friends" (no way was that an oversight.) Later by increasing the drama by "un-friending" Steve and the Apple folk. Today Tom Foremski wrote in his blog that The Goog is pushing 10%+ of all internet traffic on it's own private network. And today we see representatives in Congress talking up the devious and generally mean Chinese government and what is the US gonna do about that anyway? And now the moves are being put on the venerable office suites from Microsoft, IBM and Sun.

I don't think they'll win every battle The Goog has begun this month.  Although it does get points for trying. The desktop may be only partly won, for two reasons.

First, The Goog's products lack functionality in a couple of key areas important to the corporate sector:

• Task management is something that Microsoft alone has working well. It plays with other tools including Access, Project and SharePoint. A space where IBM does will with Lotus/Domino, but OpenOffice has nothing. None of this is a surprise, given the audiences underwriting these three: Microsoft and IBM were principally focused on large corporate accounts who could afford to invest in functionality to maximize the usefulness of their business people. Sun sponsors OpenOffice, an Open Source product for good will to the many folks who need to get their charts, memos and spreadsheets formatted and printed while keeping the price to a minimum.
  
  
  
• Database management for the desktop may be seen as a luxury for many, but while I've worked in business the dBases/R:bases Paradoxes and Accesses have been essential for driving out financial information on both scheduled and ad-hoc bases. IBM integrates this functionality; OpenOffice, not so well. One could say, OpenOffice not at all.

The Living Story (as told by Google)

Google's come out with a new format called Living Story, which proposes to change the way news is received and digested.  It's kind of a cool idea which permits newsers to produce a destination rather than a story for chosen topics.  Think, "War in Afghanistan" for instance:  one horrendous subject, many small stories which put together make for many sleepless nights.  Oh, sorry!  I meant, which make for a more comprehensive story.

It's a great idea, which many newspapers and some web sites (like the old Court TV, wherever that may be these days) have done by hand, cutting and pasting stories and ensuring links don't die while the given story has currency.  Good thing they didn't have the web during the last 'hundred years' war", or who knows what an "in-depth news story" page might have looked like.

The concept is a great one, and there will no doubt be many news companies which will go out and get them some of these pages for their presentations. 

Now, if someone could just develop a truth-o-meter, fact-checking genie, or whatever clever appellation you may wish to identify situations where the facts of the event don't precisely exactly match the facts reported!

Google,Google Labs,Content Management,CM

The Grassy Knol

This morning, I had the chance to stop by knol.Google.com, a site Google's using in its quest to gather the world's knowledge on the internet (A knol is defined as a unit of knowledge, get it?)

Knols seem to be an analog to Tweets: Units of knowledge smaller in content than a full web page with links and sub-texts, Knols are 'free' and on their ownin the world, waiting for someone to sieze upon them through a Google search [someone needs to standardize a shorter verb for 'to search Google' - 'Goog?']

Anyway, Knols are pretty cool. Here's an example of one, written to describe Adsense

Knol is more international than US-Domestic, at least determined by my unscientific review of content on the FAQ pages. There appear to be more German and French speakers than English ones posting there. There are also a number of apparent Babelfish translations into English among the English submissions. Score one for the rest of the World!

A Knol has the ability to pay part of its own way in the world, through the inclusion of Adsense. How effective this is at monetizing the distribution of your knowledge will be documented by your actual mileage, since there aren't any published results specific to Knol. My guess is you would not be in it for the money.