Google On The Radar Gun
By Sean Corbett in Miscellaneous on Oct 12, 2006 9:10PM
Google recently upgraded their suite of web-based applications for use around the office. Gmail is now supplanted by upgraded, official releases of word processing and spreadsheet programs.
The offices of Chicagoist have been using the well designed and easy to manage email client that is Gmail for some time now. Our favorite features are the quick and accurate search, and the easy to create and manage email groups. Though Gmail runs from Google’s servers somewhere in cyber-space it still seams to load faster than Microsoft Outlook. Google spreadsheets allow users to work on the same document from different locations, and search through these documents with the blazing speed we’ve come to know in Gmail.
From what we’ve seen these services are not ready (and probably not designed) to be full featured replacements for Microsoft Word and Excel. We see the benefits of having your email, calendaring, and documents instantly available from any computer on the internet as the major selling points of this service. Of course, you don’t actually pay to use these products, Google intends to earn money from advertising to you based on the text in your documents. This brings up the often cited fault of the online office suite: do you really want a huge corporation recording every email, spreadsheet, or document you or your company writes?
As you may have heard, Google announced plans to purchase YouTube for $1.65 billion. While they are at it, we at the –ist network may have some very attractive websites for sale. We might be swayed by ... ooh, lets say $10 million each? We could even work out some kind of a package deal. Incidentally, two of the founders of YouTube spent time growing up in Illinois and studied at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
YouTube has never actually made a profit, but it’s huge popularity combined with Google’s network of fiber optic cables and datacenters on the cheap will probably make them lots of money in the near term.