Web 2.0 101 - Week 5 Second Generation Web Tools
Is this the future of all software products? What do you think?
I absolutely can see a niche for services such as GoogleDocs. Being able to work collaboratively on a document without emailing copy after copy after copy to several people all the while hoping that you are working on the most current iteration and that nothing as gotten lost is amazing.
Is the future of all software products? Maybe…he said with trepidation.
I took a look at Microsoft Office Live and sat through an online demo of WebEx WebOffice. I can definately see the advantages to using the products. We experienced extended Internet outages here at the office several times over the past few months. Given that my job is to manage web based resources, my ability to do my job was severely impeded. If I was using one of these products, I could have packed up my laptop, gone home, and performed my job almost completely unimpeded. Given the fact that all of my Office documents are stored locally, however, meant that I was able to stay at my desk and deal with portions of my job that don’t require Internet connectivity. Not necessarily a bad thing.
I’m certainly in no position to be able to predict where these different and emerging technologies are headed. But for the foreseeable future, I can see both locally- and Internet-based software packages living in tandem. Internet-based packages are incredible for collaborative work, but I think we still need the relative stability of locally (or resident, whatever you want to call it) stored documents and software as well.
