Lately that's something I have heard everywhere I go, people come and run their mouth about how Google Docs is the future and Microsoft Office is older than the T-Rex. Lately Google launched a new campaign offering their Google Apps for workplaces, so you can all imagine how much some people have been commenting about it in the blogosphere.
As always I tend to go in the opposite direction of everything, so I began doing my own research about how this battle gonna end (of course I'm a simple mortal so I can't possibly predict how this is gonna end but I can give my opinion). I found out that, after reusing, Google Docs that it lacked many features and the speed that Microsoft Office has, of course that comparison is unfair one being on the desktop and the other on the web, but many people uses the accessibility that Google Docs possesses as a strong point when arguing about this topic, so why can't I use office speed as a strong point?
Google Docs is what we now days call a SaaS (Software as a Service) and is what many people calls "the way of the future" and that makes Google Docs a bleeding edge application, but is that enough to migrate from Office? In my honest opinion no, Google Docs lacks a lot of features, not a suite the size of Office and Google Docs lack ,what is in my opinion the most refreshing and interesting feature Office have, VBA (of course as a programmer I have a natural impulse to run away from anything VB but Microsoft in theory could add any .NET language and use the same subset of functionalities making a dream come true, a Microsoft Visio extension written in IronRuby).
This week I got reminded a very important lesson, programmers are suppose to write code that solves problems, be it some companies, users or personal problems. So we programmers now days tend to answer right away to every problem with "let's make a web application", but a web app is not the most efficient solution to all the world's problems, sometimes desktop apps can do the trick, let me express myself more clearly with the situation a close friend had recently. His father owns a small clinic, he is a cardiologist and he along with others doctors that work there needed a way to save their receipts and how much money each doctor made daily (yeah they pay daily over there), so my friend offered himself for the task, but there was a problem he isn't a programmer, all he knows is a little VB.NET (I'm teaching him programming but it is a slow process).
His approach was to extend Microsoft Excel's capabilities using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and store everything in the spreadsheet, of course when he came to me with the idea my suggestion was "let's make a web app", he then said to me that in his fathers clinic there was no Internet, making my initial approach totally worthless, I then offered to code (as I taught him) a desktop app, he said this people weren't very tech-savvy so we needed a new approach, finally I suggested to use Microsoft Access, yes I unleashed the horror unto the world again (we programmers usually hate Access as the DB for our projects) but my approach was a tricky one, this people were familiar with Excel and Word and I intended to leverage Access' power and usability based on the fact that almost all of the Office suite uses the "Ribbon interface". A few days later my friend came by to play a little hand of Cashflow and showed me the results of his work, I was amazed by how he learned to use Access and how much he had done using VBA, I taught him a few of SQL's commands and probably after he finish with some details about the application, he will have done a complete and functional application on Microsoft Access which real people are using to solve their problems, that is the true power hidden in Microsoft Office (average people only knows how to use a tenth of all of Office capabilities, far less knows how much VBA can help), a power Google Docs currently doesn't have (if I'm wrong please respond with a link) but on the IT industry nothing stays the same for too long, probably Google could add this kind of functionality offering some sort of JavaScript idiom, the point is, this is a great feature of Office today but tomorrow it might just be some standard all office suites offer.
At the end of the day the lack of features and applications (the suite is a lot bigger in Microsoft Office than the suite Google Docs offers) on the Google Docs suite makes it a no brainer for me to go with Microsoft Office as my preferred tool. The accessibility of Google Docs, as being a SaaS application, is not enough for me to migrate from Microsoft Office.
As always I tend to go in the opposite direction of everything, so I began doing my own research about how this battle gonna end (of course I'm a simple mortal so I can't possibly predict how this is gonna end but I can give my opinion). I found out that, after reusing, Google Docs that it lacked many features and the speed that Microsoft Office has, of course that comparison is unfair one being on the desktop and the other on the web, but many people uses the accessibility that Google Docs possesses as a strong point when arguing about this topic, so why can't I use office speed as a strong point?
Google Docs is what we now days call a SaaS (Software as a Service) and is what many people calls "the way of the future" and that makes Google Docs a bleeding edge application, but is that enough to migrate from Office? In my honest opinion no, Google Docs lacks a lot of features, not a suite the size of Office and Google Docs lack ,what is in my opinion the most refreshing and interesting feature Office have, VBA (of course as a programmer I have a natural impulse to run away from anything VB but Microsoft in theory could add any .NET language and use the same subset of functionalities making a dream come true, a Microsoft Visio extension written in IronRuby).
This week I got reminded a very important lesson, programmers are suppose to write code that solves problems, be it some companies, users or personal problems. So we programmers now days tend to answer right away to every problem with "let's make a web application", but a web app is not the most efficient solution to all the world's problems, sometimes desktop apps can do the trick, let me express myself more clearly with the situation a close friend had recently. His father owns a small clinic, he is a cardiologist and he along with others doctors that work there needed a way to save their receipts and how much money each doctor made daily (yeah they pay daily over there), so my friend offered himself for the task, but there was a problem he isn't a programmer, all he knows is a little VB.NET (I'm teaching him programming but it is a slow process).
His approach was to extend Microsoft Excel's capabilities using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and store everything in the spreadsheet, of course when he came to me with the idea my suggestion was "let's make a web app", he then said to me that in his fathers clinic there was no Internet, making my initial approach totally worthless, I then offered to code (as I taught him) a desktop app, he said this people weren't very tech-savvy so we needed a new approach, finally I suggested to use Microsoft Access, yes I unleashed the horror unto the world again (we programmers usually hate Access as the DB for our projects) but my approach was a tricky one, this people were familiar with Excel and Word and I intended to leverage Access' power and usability based on the fact that almost all of the Office suite uses the "Ribbon interface". A few days later my friend came by to play a little hand of Cashflow and showed me the results of his work, I was amazed by how he learned to use Access and how much he had done using VBA, I taught him a few of SQL's commands and probably after he finish with some details about the application, he will have done a complete and functional application on Microsoft Access which real people are using to solve their problems, that is the true power hidden in Microsoft Office (average people only knows how to use a tenth of all of Office capabilities, far less knows how much VBA can help), a power Google Docs currently doesn't have (if I'm wrong please respond with a link) but on the IT industry nothing stays the same for too long, probably Google could add this kind of functionality offering some sort of JavaScript idiom, the point is, this is a great feature of Office today but tomorrow it might just be some standard all office suites offer.
At the end of the day the lack of features and applications (the suite is a lot bigger in Microsoft Office than the suite Google Docs offers) on the Google Docs suite makes it a no brainer for me to go with Microsoft Office as my preferred tool. The accessibility of Google Docs, as being a SaaS application, is not enough for me to migrate from Microsoft Office.
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