I just see an issue with saving your AIR docs back to Google docs, at least with the current implementation as the additional functionality that AIR provides would then be useless to share back to Google docs without changes to Google docs that would probably make the point of the AIR docs application moot.

Sure Office has a longer feature list, but for most people Google Docs will do everything they need it to do right now. At the end of the day the additional features of storing/sharing your files in the cloud will eventually be the one feature that everyone wants.

Thats quite a strong statement. I think quite a few people would disagree with that.

Yes, they might welcome the additional functionality that AIR could bring, but without that functionality it definitely doesn’t mean that the product fails.

Chanced upon an interesting blog post about Google Docs on ReadWriteWeb that evoked some equally interesting responses. One commentator in particular was very vociferous on how Google docs fails the cut in so many basic ways. To this, Ryan Stewart of…

Great writeup. I have been hoping for “advanced versions” of Gmail and Docs for ages now, and I do believe AIR can deliver that.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to think that it’s about betting on the right horses, see who wins.

I wrote some thoughts on that on my blog:

http://www.noscope.com/journal/2008/02/not-sitting-in-a-tree

Having said that, I still find online Google docs very useful, considering I am on mac-osx and don’t want to buy MS Office or other office packages. Don’t enjoy OpenOffice version that runs on top of X11….

I have been using Google Presentation recently, love it for it’s simplicity. Good enough for folks like me, who don’t want to get overwhelmed by the complexity of software on the cost of complex user-interfaces. Jeff Raskin, in Humane Interface, said something like that – complex tasks would require complex user-interactions but that’s no excuse to make simple tasks complex – I totally agree with him…

I also used Google spreadsheet, good enough for me Buzzword rocks, it doesn’t work on mobile devices – that’s the only thing I miss.. I think, web applications should provide access to documents even from mobile devices, probably, if not an ability to create new documents but at-least a way to read, email, share existing documents…

BTW! Now going to read Karim’s comment, heh…

Thanks

-abdul

The question you have to ask is would Google bother? Or when will Google bother?

For Google the Docs suite is a slow burner against Microsoft’s incumbent, they don’t have to “beat” anyone, they just have to exist – they don’t have to set release dates – they don’t have to have a public road map – they don’t have to spend millions of dollars rushing out the latest version – they just have to wait until the trickle turns into a torrent.

I see Google holding out until AIR v2 before they start porting their tertiary product (let’s not forget Docs is not Google primary product) to the desktop.