
Chrome, the Google Docs-mobile - pchristensen
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/chrome-gdocs-msoffice/
======
electromagnetic
Here's the simple, god honest truth to why Google is making Docs as well as
all the other apps they have. Because it makes people use google more! The
more time people spend online, the more money google makes.

Why the hell are people coming up with complex theories on this. The whole
reason Google is producing Android is because Google.com will be the fucking
default page! Chrome was released, because Google.com will be peoples default
page! Any search on Google gives them money, so they want people to search
more.

It's an infinitely expandable market. When people spend more time on the
internet, more advertising revenue goes into a smaller window. Hence why
advertising in the half-time of the Superbowl costs companies millions, but if
you advertise on another channel at the same time you'll get the best deal all
year because no ones on any other channel.

The more people use google, the more advertisers spend money through google's
AdSense. When the price to advertise goes up on the search page, google is
making more money for just as much expense. There's only a limited amount of
advertising space on a google search page, and the more it gets in demand, the
more it's worth.

It can cost like $4,000 for an advert on a local cable channel. It cost $2.7
million per 30 seconds during the 2007 superbowl break, for the same time
slot. Google doesn't want shitty little companies advertising for a few bucks
a pop, they want adverts by Coca-Cola and Pepsi who are worth millions per
advert.

~~~
unalone
That's not the entire reason. Firefox defaults to Google as the front page and
as the search engine. Unlike Chrome, it doesn't even ask if you want to use a
different search engine.

Of course AdSense is a part of it. But assuming that they needed to invent a
browser just to get AdSense revenue is stupid. There's more to Google's
strategy to that.

Docs: again, it's not just AdSense. It's letting Google index more. It's
giving them primary control over content. No surprise Docs lets you publish
directly to BlogSpot. It's all about keeping it in Google and giving it
primary access to indexed material.

------
unalone
I've heard this argument thrown about before, and it really doesn't work for
me.

First off, I'm fairly certain that Docs doesn't allow for offline editing yet,
and that's a biggie. Google would want to have that in place before launching
Chrome, if that was their goal. There would also be much more of an effort
FROM Google to do this.

Second off, look at how Docs has been evolving. It's not being treated as a
huge, money-throwing competitor. I mean, it's been passed by several document
editors, most primarily Buzzword, and it's happened without Google making any
sort of a fuss.

The method of saving documents is horribly inefficient. If you need an SSB for
every single document, it's merely adding clutter and it's using a fairly
inefficient task process to do so.

Frankly, I don't think that Docs is an Office competitor. I think that people
who think that are deluding themselves. Docs is an effort by Google to hold
more of your work and to index it. I've seen several people using Docs as a
blog to distribute papers. That's what Google wants. It's like how they will
give you links to Notebooks if you look for certain research information.
They're going entirely the wrong way with Docs for it to work well.

If anything, I think they made Chrome to force everybody else's hand.
Ultrafast Javascript, advanced script handling, Gears support: they're doing
that so everybody else feels forced to catch up. I'd guess the goal of Chrome
is to advance the web browser so that Google can make its own products more
complex. Other theories ring hollow.

~~~
electromagnetic
Oh man, you're hilarious. You're fairly certain Docs doesn't allow for offline
editing yet? REALLY?!! They've offered it since May 2007 when they released
Gears, that was the whole purpose of Gears to allow offline access to online
content. It works in YouTube for gods sake, did you not even bother to read
what Docs or Gears is before claiming knowledge about them?!

Why do you claim saving documents is inefficient, when a SSB of a document can
be HTML, OpenOffice, PDF, RTF, TXT or Doc. I'm sorry, I'm failing to see how
this is inefficient? I mean, how can it be any more inefficient than Office
that makes a clutter of files without a users consent?

With Docs I have full access to my files anywhere, including offline. Then
whenever I need it in an actual file format, I merely download it, which
incidentally can be done whilst using offline mode. BTW, the application
shortcut provided when allowing Docs to run through Gears actually defaults to
offline access and connects if it detects an internet connection.

Oh and, here's the trumps of using Docs. The one time an error happened, I
wasn't told the problem the error report was sent to the developers. And you
know what, the error never happened again and I didn't have to wait till
Office 2012 for the fucking fix! That's why Docs is better than Office,
because it's not updated every half-decade and still a buggy CPU hogging piece
of expensive crap.

~~~
unalone
I was under the impression that you could access files but not edit them. That
was how it stood the last time I used Docs, and a version of Gears then
wouldn't allow for editing.

I use "inefficient" because when I look at SSBs I tend to look at them as a
whole. When you open an SSB, it creates a separate process for that one
browser. (I haven't tried this with Chrome, but that's how it works in Prism,
Safari 4, and Fluid.) That means, among other things, that when you go to pick
default browser and other various browser commends, you get a cluttered list
of documents taking up space where your various important browsers ought to
take precedence.

Of course the SSB defaults to offline. Isn't that the point of Gears? I never
suggested that Gears didn't work as mentioned.

And I've used Docs. I'm aware that there are good things to it. That doesn't
mean that it has no flaws, or that it's actually a decent replacement for
Office. It doesn't have nearly the power that Office does. That's where
Microsoft excels. Every small thing you might ever need to do, you CAN do.
It's bloated but it never lacks a feature. Docs still lacks a decent page
arrangement tool. And I know that some people don't care about page layouts,
but _that's the point._ Docs is extremely lightweight and it helps people who
need a generic word processor. That doesn't make it an Office competitor. And
I don't think it _wants_ to be an Office competitor, which is the point that I
made when I posted.

I'm not saying this as an Office fanboy. I use TextEdit and Pages for my work.
(I'm pretty sure that I can actually do more in TextEdit than I can in Docs,
by the way: just to make a comparison point.) I use Dropbox to sync up my
files, which is nice because it's much more intuitive when it's already
installed on both computers, and because I get to use the more potent desktop
editors.

I won't begrudge you the ability to make angry posts, but for the love of God:
make sure you actually know what the other person was _talking_ about before
you make an angry response. I used Docs intensively for 2 years with a group
of people; I used Gears over the same period of time; I'm a huge fan of
Chrome. I disagreed with the central point of this blog post. Not over
everything this post mentions or stands for. Cool it a bit.

------
mixmax
While I think it's a great article Peter, I also think that Google's main
incentive lies elsewhere. Incidentally Joel also wrote about this in his
strategy letter V
(<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html>)

In my mind, what google tries to do with chrome is to commoditize the browser,
which is a complementary product to their online services.

~~~
pchristensen
I don't know, I'd say that browsers are already pretty commoditized. Pre-
installed on every machine, several free alternatives available, etc. If
anything, they're commoditizing Javascript processing, effectively giving a
clock speed boost for internet usage.

But their pages are already the fastest pages on the internet, so it probably
doesn't help them sell too many more ads just with speed.

