Log in and lock in
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Web browser, Internet on
There’s a proliferation of online document editing services. At Web 2.0 Expo every man (and his dog) seemed to be demonstrating another cloud-based document service. Now Google’s applications have been bundled with Salesforce.com’s online business services. Are desktop applications doomed?
From where I’m standing the answer has to be no.
Microsoft’s Office file formats were often described as how it locked customers into a never-ending cycle of upgrades. New version, new file format. That changed with the arrival of tools that decoded Microsoft’s files and provided compatibility. Open Office and the like had effective file converters that meant you weren’t locked in, and Microsoft’s new XML formats mean you can get at your text no matter what…
Online the story’s different. Create a document in Google Docs and it goes straight into their database. Yes you can save it locally, but that’s not the point of cloud services - you want to be able to get at that file wherever you are. So it stays on Google’s hard drives with no SLA, and no guarantee that you’ll be able to get your files if the service is ever withdrawn - and no idea if you’ll even get notice of a service’s imminent demise. It’s the same for Zoho or for Buzzword or any of a myriad other services. The cloud may be big, but there isn’t enough market out there (especially at $5 a month a user) for all the services to survive. When one goes down, and one will, sooner than later, how will you get your documents?
It’s the ultimate lock in, far worse than anything Office ever did. Unless, of course, you explicitly remember to save documents locally (and it’s not surprising that you have to click an export button to do just that). The convenience of online access to files isn’t enough to give up the freedom to store files where and how you want.
That’s enough to make me stay away. Things get even worse when you actually try to use them for what they’re apparently best at: collaboration.
If two people are trying to work together on a document, it’s good to be able to share edits and to quickly change focus. Try to use Google Docs, and things get a little tricky. Is the current section of the document locked or not? It’s impossible to tell - and if it is, it’s also hard to find out when the lock times out. The locks vary from application to application, and vendor to vendor. It’s not difficult to lock on a per word or per cell basis, and Excel has been offering per cell locking for network collaboration since the mid 1990s. Flickr developer Kellan Elliot-Mcrea put it last week, talking about online tools, “Good model for lightweight collaboration. It’s great up to a point - for most people that point is when you leave your office.”
Then there’s the time warp effect, when you’re taken back to the heady days of Word 6.1 and suddenly all the functions you’ve come to rely on suddenly vanish.
It’s time to make a stand. If you want me to use your online applications then let me have easy access to local copies, give me an effective collaboration platform, and throw in a decade or so’s worth of UI and functional improvements. Until then I’ll stick with Office and I’ll just move my files around with Live Mesh or .Mac or whatever synchronisation tool works best for me.
–Simon
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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