Sam Sethi posted at TechCrunch UK three days ago that 'I suddenly felt a wave of liberation come over me as I decided this was a good time to move my entire digital life (and data) to the web':
My goal was to simply separate my data from the application and in turn from the operating system.
So: Google Apps for Your Domain ('to host my POP3 email accounts and calendars'), Google Reader ('the next desktop item removed was my desktop RSS Reader'), Google Docs & Spreadsheets ('The next big challenge was to see if I could do without Microsoft’s Office on my desktop … Although I would consider myself a heavy user of Outlook and Powerpoint, I now consider myself a “lite” user of Excel, Word and Access'). On quitting MS Office for Google Docs & Spreadsheets:
I was pleasantly surprised, although it’s still very rudimentary - like moving back to Office 2002 or earlier - the product fits well with my “lite” user requirements. That said, the best thing about Docs & Spreadsheet was being able to collaborate online with other people. More often than not, that is what I find myself doing these days. e.g. for the TechCrunch Party I was collaborating with several people about the attendee list. No longer did I have to email document attachments and then integrate the changes from several people. I simply invited the people to use the online file and we all collaborated on the same file. Of course had Google bought JotSpot sooner, I might have additionally used the wiki capabilities.
Using Docs & Spreadsheet has enabled me to successfully remove the need for Word, Excel and Access 2003 from my desktop and to be clear I will NOT be upgrading to Office 2007 for the princely sum of £/$400. Instead I will use the Office 2007 free viewers if I need to read Office attachments in the future or I can wait until Google provide a free converter/reader for Docs & Spreadsheet. In fact most of the documents I receive today are PDF file attachments and I have already replaced Adobe’s desktop reader with the smaller, faster and free Firefox plug-in called Foxit.
Equally having replaced the need for Outlook, the issue of synchronisation between Outlook and Google calendars and the respective inboxes quickly became a non-issue. Although if you still wish to still use Outlook’s calendar then there are third party solutions that enable you to link the two services. The last major hurdle was to replace the need for PowerPoint, so I decided to trial a combination of online services. The first I am using is SlideShare which enables me to upload my (old) existing Powerpoint presentations and make them available online. Secondly I am trying two online presentation tools , Empressr and Thumbstacks. As Google continues to build their version of Office “online”, I guess it won’t be long before Google enter the market again and buy a presentation tool, but which one?
Sam goes on to discuss online storage ('[I] needed to have an online storage drive so that I was truly free of the OS and that when I was out and about I could also access my files'): what Google might soon offer and other, existing options, such as Amazon's S3. He concludes in part: 'Of course there are some feature limitations about this online configuration but most of those holes are being filled in by greasemonkey scripts or Firefox extensions for now. … Of course not everyone agrees with this type of migration to the web and I must admit for many people the richness of desktop applications will remain superior. I guess what I am looking for is flexibility of choice over bloated functionality that I no longer need or can afford.'
Well, sending this TechCrunch UK link to some colleagues immediately elicited a 'Just what I'm thinking of doing' response. (Sam followed up his posting with another, the same day, Hasta La Vista Microsoft … we won’t be back!, in which he noted others — Richard McManus, Ryan Carson — newly posting their thoughts about, or recording their experience with web-apps.) I had students last academic year writing essays in Writely, and I certainly expect the depth and degree of student and teacher engagement with web-apps to change dramatically in the coming months.
I blogged previously about Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Apps for Education here and here, and about Google Reader here. In the end, I think there's still a great market for hybrid tools. (One of my sons, on a new machine and without MS Word, asked my advice and ended up writing his university essay using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. But he told me later that he then downloaded his document at uni where he could finish off the look of his essay in Word.) Going online is going to score highly, though, because of ease of access (to your data), because of ease and reliability of storage (let a pro outfit store your data and back it up) — and because of the collaborative possibilities web-apps open up. The last will become very big, but right now are probably not figuring much on the radar of most early users in schools. (When we really understand the way the web has opened up collaborative possibilities then we will have undergone a sea change in education.)
Of course, there's edge … and there's edge. Matt is already thinking about deploy-to-desktop:
Web apps are currently undergoing a renaissance–or perhaps they’re fulfilling the promise made when the genre was created in 1999. The technology, skills and community that go to make these web apps is beginning to turn in many different directions. We’ll soon see a number of different web app species. One I find most exciting is Deploy to Desktop. What if the same skills needed to build complex web apps could be turned to making desktop applications, starting from a simple web app in a HTML renderer window, and iterating to use native widgets, drag and drop, and full OS integration? (More about this in my App After App talk.)
As he writes there, he's not alone. How different computing will seem in just a short while.
