Google just released the limited beta version of their new online Spreadsheet application. I signed up as soon as it was available and received my invitation a few hours later. After working on a few spreadsheets with it, I found it to be a nice, easy to use spreadsheet application. I think it has a lot of potential. However, I am not planning to switch from Excel to Google Spreadsheets anytime soon. This got me thinking about the pros and cons of online office apps, and I hace concluded that most office apps have a long way to go before they are widely used. So here is a list of some of the cons of online applications, and my thoughts about them.
Outages
When I want to open up a document, I want to be able to access it right away. If the app goes down, I won’t be able to open my document and that will cause a loss of productivity. On the tradiditonal desktop the only time you have an outage is when your machine crashes or the app installation gets corrupted. You(or your IT department) are resonsible for keeping your machine running. If you are using an online application, you are still resonsible for keeping your machine running, but you also have to rely on the asp to keep their service running. Asps work hard to keep their application up at all times. I work for an asp, so I know how important it is to keep it up and running. Our company uses Salesforce for keeping track of our customers, and I have heard the complaints whenever salesforce goes down, or has other issues.
Bandwidth
Feature rich applications require a lot of bandwidth. With some applications, like Salesforce, email, calendars, etc, current bandwidth speeds are already adequate. When you use those applications you are typically working with small amounts of data stored in a database. Office apps like Writely and Google Spreadsheets use significantly more bandwidth. For instance, when you open a spreadsheet with Excel, Excel copies itself into memory and loads your spreadsheet. To load a spreadsheet from your computer into Google spreadsheet, the app has to download its files off Google’s servers and load into your computer. Then it has to load the document. And to save it to their servers it has to copy it across the internet. Obviously the bandwidth between your hard drive and memory is millions times faster then the pipe across the internet. For Google spreadsheets to have a chance at competing with Excel it will need to have all the features of Excel. This will make the app quite a bit bigger. Of course it only needs to copy the parts it needs when it needs it, but that will put more strain on your bandwidth.
Privacy
No big corporation is ever going to want their sensitive data stored on another corporation server. And the way these online apps work best is when the document that is being worked on is on the same server as the app. This is probably the biggest deterrent to the adoption of online apps.
Solutions
To solve the problem of bandwidth and outages, the app could cache itself on the users computer, thus making itself available during outages, and being able to load more features in the background while it works. This could also solve the privacy problem by allowing the app to open local files easier. But if you think about this approach, it is reinventing the wheel. The online app is now a client app because it is storing itself and running on the local computer. And we already have great client apps that do this. What I feel will happen is that server products will be developed to interoperate with client apps, and also provide an online interface to those apps. If you have every used Microsofts Outlook Web Access, you know that it works almost exactly like Outlook 2003. Eventually they should develop Word and Excel versions that would allow you to remotely work on your documents. This would be a great system for corporations.
In conclusion, I think that the current online office apps are a long way from becoming a threat to current client apps. As Microsoft said their features are old by over 10 years. I don’t completely understand the goal of these online apps. They are moving everything that has been on traditionally on the desktop to the server, despite the fact that computer hardware is getting faster all the time. There is obviously a cycle to software, as we are slowly starting to move back to software on the server, just like in the early days of computing with mainframes and terminals. Just now our software is on the other side of the internet.
Take over? I dont know! But I do believe it is a great move. The whole notion of on demand business applications (outsourced) and web 2.0 mashups is very appealing to a large sector of the software industry. Many small businesses who could not afford the millions it costs for traditional CRM are now using SaaS CRM by companies like http://www.salesboom.com and others.
AJAX, and on demand applications is the next big thing.
For most people to jump onto the Google bandwagon and abandon Microsoft they just need to see that the application is fast and cheaper than the competition. With Google and their huge name in online projects I have a feeling they will be able to pull this off. Personally I would rather have the application saved to the desktop like Google Earth while having an online repository for the documents I have worked on. This would make synchronizing my desktop and laptop so much easier.
What about combining best of both worlds? Xcellery extends Microsoft Excel with all the advantages of an online spreadsheet. Don’t learn a new tool but enjoy all the features of an online spreadsheet. This all works with zero installation and available for free on http://www.xcellery.com.