Got to thinking on my drive in today about how varied my apps/tech usage is getting. Pre-2008, my world was primarily MSFT based… Office for Apps, Windows Media, mp3 player (no iPod), Communicator for IM… In 2008, look at the changes… have been won over by my iPod, Twitter/Twihrl for communicating with colleagues instead of Communicator, YouTube for videos, Facebook as another form of communicating/reaching out to friends… and now Google Apps. I needed to set up a survey and was thinking of using SurveyMonkey or some other entity but heard they are filled with Ads, etc. Chis mentioned that he’s used Google Spreadsheets to run a few surveys. So I went and tested it out, and viola (though I like to spell it wallah as well!) I had a survey set up to meet Likert Scale survey specs (Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree) in 10 minutes. One area that I have started using more from MSFT is OneNote… does a great job of tracking/organizing mtgs on the fly.
What does all of this mean? Not sure for the long term except for the fact that the competition for MSFT continues to heat up… which is why I was a bit shocked when I read Bill Gates making a comment a month ago something to the effect of “Google doesn’t understand the applications business”. Pretty bold statement to make, though I would have to believe internally they do not believe this. If they do believe it… l see a lot of unused cube space in Redmond in 10 years.
Filed under: Innovation, Tech | Tagged: Microsoft, Web 2.0
Same is true for me, especially for my personal life. Other than Vista I don’t use any Microsoft products any more at home. Picasa for photos, google docs for work, twhirl for communications, gmail for email, wordpress for blogging. Really the only non-cloud software I use anymore is Quicken. And I would stop using that if Mint would allow me to import all my old Quicken data.
Google is on the same attack vector to the enterprise that Microsoft was a decade ago: through the home user that brings their stuff to work. The partnerships with Salesforce.com will only accelerate this.
Forgot about personal finance software. We used Excel for the longest time because it “just worked”… however, we just moved to Yodlee and I am ecstatic with it. True the massive manual process in moving over data is an obstacle… but it’s been worth it so far.