The Cloud and The Future of Google Docs

Ask most anybody working in the world of computers and they’ll tell you that the future lies in The Cloud (or a series of many Clouds). I agree, and I think I may know how Google is going to launch the world forward into this next phase of data storage.

For those that don’t know, The Cloud refers to servers where personal data is stored. Apple’s product Mobile Me is a good example of using The Cloud. A user’s calendar and phone contacts are kept on their phone, their computer, and on a server that Apple maintains. When a change is made on one device, it immediately shows up on all the user’s devices. For example, a user adds an event “Joe’s Birthday” on their iPhone’s calendar. Later that night when they log onto their computer, they will see that event already added to iCal because the iPhone has communicated that changed to the central server, and iCal as checked with that same server for any changes.

Using The Cloud for emails and calendar events is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is capable in the next few years. Already, entire computers are run in The Cloud and displayed on dummy terminals. In this way, a laptop with just a monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and Internet connection can be more powerful than a desktop computer. Eventually, it could be that nobody stores any data on their personal computers, and could just log on to their personal desktop from any computer with an Internet connection, like a VPN account, but 1000x better and for everybody in the world. In the mean time, The Cloud still has immense potential for extending data portability.

Of course, Google is known for search, but they do so much more. One popular product is Google Docs. Google Docs is an online word processor and works like a simplified version of Microsoft Word. All the files are stored in The Cloud and are accessible from any computer with an internet connection. Although files are private by default, users on Google Docs can share files with other users to allow them to read or revise the documents online. In addition to Google Docs, Google also has similar products to mimic Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint.

My school newspaper uses Google Docs for storing all of our work so that editors can quickly access and revise articles, and we love it, but Google Docs has three glaring flaws that top it from replacing Microsoft Word.

First, it is not a fully featured word processor. There are plenty of things it can do, but it still cannot match the thousands of features in Word, and with current Internet connection speeds, it never will have all of those features.

Second, files on Google Docs are only saved in the Cloud, not on a user’s computer. This can lead to problems when there is not an Internet connection or edits are made to a file on a user’s computer but not on the version of that file in Google Docs.

Thirdly, as I alluded to the my last point, Google Docs cannot be used offline (by default), and when it is used offline, it still isn’t a fully featured word processor. Google does let users turn on an offline version of Google Docs so that they can access files and edit them when they do not have an internet connection, but it requires messing around with settings and installing extra software, something that the typical user does not want to do (or may not know how to do).

Thankfully, all of these problems can be solved within the next year, if Google gets its act together that is. What they need is a fully featured word processor for offline use that can use The Cloud to sync files across Google Docs and files saved directly onto computers. This may sound like a large undertaking, but it really isn’t.

Google is a well-known supporter of open source software like Firefox, and they distribute Firefox along with Google software like Google Earth in their recommended software package “Google Pack.” Another piece of open source software that Google has supported in the past and has put in “Google Pack” is OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a suite of software with programs equivalent to the software included in Microsoft Office. Like Firefox, it is completely free. Before I switched to my current MacBook, I had a Sony laptop, and I used OpenOffice for years. It is compatible with Microsoft Office and works great. Today though, I use Microsoft Office because OpenOffice is not properly available for Macs (NeoOffice and the X11 version do not count). Slowly, developers are making a version of OpenOffice to use on Macs, but the process seems to be going very slowly.

In the past, Google has sent OpenOffice programmers to help develop the software. Now, they need to do the same thing and send over some people to get OpenOffice on Macs. Once OpenOffice can be used on Macs, Google would just need to create a piece of software that syncs files from computers to The Cloud (much like Dropbox). With all of this in place, everyday users would happily migrate away from Microsoft Office to Google Docs much like they have done with Firefox.

Given what Google has accomplished in the past, this should not be a challenge. In fact, if they wanted to speed up the process, they could just purchase ThinkFree Office and rebrand it. It does essentially what I am suggesting, but isn’t as stable as it could be and doesn’t have a big name like Google behind it right now. Besides, Google Docs is really just a rebranded Writely.com.