Google Docs allowed me to complete the switch to Linux and Mac. I can easily exchange Word and PDF copies of my documents with email contacts, never have to worry about which partition my files happen to be on today, and better yet: access my documents from anywhere.
I love the fact that Google can take documents from GMail and with one click open them in Google Docs. The ability to share and collaborate on documents is awesome as well. Emailing the same file over and over again to an entire mailing list and making sure not to loose revisions is a thing of the past.
Turns out people like to communicate and collaborate and they like the convenience of having their files available everywhere. MS has failed to deliver in this area.
Google Docs is simply a web storage. The actual "office" part, specifically the text editing, is done by a rich text control embedded into your browser, which is written in C++ or plain C i.e. it is as much "web" as Office itself, only many times less powerful. Closest Windows desktop equivalent? The mighty WordPad circa 1994!
You could have completed your Linux switch without Google Docs. AbiWord kicks GDocs' butt, as well as KWord, I am not even talking about Sun's junk.
We tried to use Google docs and for anything more complex than 2-3 paragraphs of simple text it was inadequate. You can't even control line spacing for god's sake.
The entire browser's set of controls is written in C or C++ and is provided by underlying OS the browser runs on. On Windows it's RichEdit control. On Linux it's something else. There is no API in existence that lets you do anything outside of browser limitations.
JavaScript is only used to manipulate API of those controls, but not to implement controls themselves. This means that "Office" part of Google Docs is implemented by FireFox/IE/Safari, where google only provides storage for their output.
Everything in the browser eventually comes down to C/C++. But as far as I can tell controls like the Yahoo UI Rich Text Editor are implemented in pure Javascript. And by this I mean it modifies the DOM in Javascript (and the browser handles rendering the updated DOM) as opposed to using browser magic (like an ActiveX control in IE). If I'm wrong, could someone please point me to documentation explaining exactly how these RTE's are implemented?
Maybe it didn't work for you. I use it to manage my resume for example without a single problem. I can access it from anywhere, share it with people, track changes and email word or PDF copies. I haven't used a desktop word processor in the last year (unless I'm opening some file from a backup disk that I haven't had a chance to upload).
And wordpad was a pretty decent editor. The problem is it couldn't open word files sent by others (so I always had to install Office or convert files to RTF). Turns out most word documents render just fine in RTF.
I love the fact that Google can take documents from GMail and with one click open them in Google Docs. The ability to share and collaborate on documents is awesome as well. Emailing the same file over and over again to an entire mailing list and making sure not to loose revisions is a thing of the past.
Turns out people like to communicate and collaborate and they like the convenience of having their files available everywhere. MS has failed to deliver in this area.