I was doing a bit of work from home this weekend when I noticed Google’s next move in its ongoing battle to take over the world (or at least that part of it which resides on computers). Checking an email in my Gmail account from a colleague who had sent me a Word document I had a new choice about how I wished to view this document.
So, in a very subtle manner, Google was now encouraging me to stop using Word and replace it with (the free) Google Document (or Writely, to those of us with a memory longer than a goldfish). And I wasn’t the only one to notice. Over at The Observer John Naughton was pondering whether this would herald serious problems for Microsoft’s new Vista package if Web 2.0 kids decide that they have no problem replacing software for documents based in browsers.
Elsewhere, the lovely people at Pandia had theorised about what the Internet world would look like in the year 2015, and reckoned that Google’s free tools would have killed Microsoft’s Office business. And within my company, I have heard highly influential senior managers talk about how within a year or two they won’t need a laptop any more because they’ll just use Google tools instead of Office and will save everything online.
And all of this sounds great, and amazing, and “Wow! Futuristic!”… except, I can’t help wondering what sort of business world some of these people are living in. Now unless they really do have the memory of goldfish, these people will know that search engines are not averse to letting data spill into the public domain, or handing it to whichever government asks most firmly. And whilst Google has held out against a lot of calls for its data, it has been known to do what it’s told.
It’s also worth mentioning that whilst PCs & Macs are not immune to having data stolen from them, surely they tend to inspire more confidence than data stored in a 3rd parties database. If you ran a multi-national company, would you really be happy to keep sensitive financial data in an online system run by a company that has been known to give out data, censor its business, and otherwise not totally respect the privacy of its users?
I’ll sum it up like this – if Matt Cutts were to go for a new job, do you think that he would write his CV on Google Documents?
