I can see the promise of Google docs, sure. I think something like the old XDrive approach is better for distributing documents. The document itself is shared, but rich documents don’t, imo, need to have wiki-like controls.

Gmail is still “beta”, as far as I see :-), and while I like the ability to search my archives and see messages in threaded view, I don’t like that if Google’s retention policy changes, I don’t actually have any of that mail. Oh, and Google gets to read my mail, which isn’t entirely comforting with the recent Beacon disaster.

I agree, increased bandwidth and smart minds are making more inroads into dumb terminal land. I have to wonder if a hybrid approach is the best, where you have the full application on your drive, but the actual data out there, backed up in cyberspace. The solutions so far have been too one sided… either the internet isn’t used (Word 2003 model), or the internet is used not only to house the data but also to operate the application (Google Docs model). I think there is a compromise there that will work best.

Thanks for dropping by.

I don’t use Google Docs either, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future, but I can definitely see the appeal of a) being able to work on your documents from anywhere without having to carry them around on a USB drive, and b) not having to worry about losing all your documents in a hard drive crash. It’s convenient to have a single, secure place to store your documents without having to dig through old backup media from previous computers, etc. And it’s a pretty natural progression from services like Gmail and del.icio.us.

Also, the “dumb terminal” thing is really picking up steam now–lots of organizations are moving towards using thin clients instead of PCs.