March of the Google

COMMUNICATION

Perhaps for the first time after email, a work-related application program was served on-demand. And I didn't pay a bomb for it.

A Microsoft Office (Student & Teacher Edition) 2003 retails for roughly Rs 7,500 a pack in India "� I know because I bought it. Within that, you get Microsoft Outlook, the fairly powerful mail program, MS Word, on which this piece is being written on and a friend of most hacks. You also get two offerings that are not quite friends of most hacks; Excel with which you do spreadsheets and Power Point for presentations and slide shows.

All of which you possibly know. Now, I did ask around but discovered that it was not possible to buy components of MS Office, like just Outlook and Word. So, it was take it or leave it, from the big Bill. I took it. Since then, I have been wondering when this state of affairs would change. The answer came sooner than I would have expected.

A few weeks ago, while trawling the internet, I came across a beta for Google's spreadsheet program. It has no name as such but is really an Excel killer. A few days later, I had some Excel work to do. I also discovered that the Excel on my desktop was a 'reader'. I could only read the files in question.

I thought and said why not ? So, I logged into Google spreadsheets "� Google incidentally allows access into all their betas, including those with quasi-commercial applications, with a single gmail account "� and opened the MS Excel file. Now, remember there is no program or package on my desktop. Whatever is driving this spreadsheet is mostly sitting on a server in California.

Power Excel users are better positioned to comment but I thought it worked okay. It struck me that perhaps for the first time after email, a work-related application program was served to me on demand. And I sure didn't pay Rs 7,500 for it. And from what I read around on the technical discussion forums, Google did this just for kicks. Wonder what it could do if it got serious.

To be fair, there is value in MS Office. But here, Microsoft is its own competition. Newer, beta versions of Hotmail offer a Outlook like screen where you can move your cursor down, open, move or delete mails.

This is of course a response to Google's Gmail which in turn is so powerful and offers such vast storage that you might as well discard your hard disk. But Gmail also offers additions like Google Calender which takes on a Outlook function. Google's Calender obviously is accessed on the internet. Outlook Calender is rigged with the Outlook. So is, thus, any data, that you might have.

So what is all this leading to ? One, free software. More importantly, I am now wondering whether we can imagine a situation where you don't need a laptop. At least not because you have to lug data around. Think about it. With ubiquitous internet and desktops lying around in public places like airports, coffee shops, the day is not far when you could leave home without your laptop.

Why, because between 2GB of Google mail capacity and the ability to run calendars and Excel files, a good part of your office work is taken care of. The final question, what about the stationary office mail accounts, running through your organisation network server.

Well, Google just introduced (so are Microsoft and Yahoo) a web-based mail application for multiple users. So a small organisation can run entirely on Google enterprise mail rather shell out for MS Outlook. How does it work ? Well, I've registered for a beta. And so can you.