Thursday, June 15, 2006

Google versus Microsoft, and the Henry Ford trap

Google and Microsoft differ fundamentally in their views on Office applications. While Google is all for having the application residing on a server, with the user accessing and using it through a thin client (browser), Microsoft believes in the traditional notion of having the application reside on your hard disk. [read about Google Spreadsheet]

In the medium term, with bandwidth being an issue, apart from the fact that there is only so much you can do inside a browser, I expect Microsoft to win the Office battle. In the long run too, with cheap hard disk space and cheap processors, I do not see much benefit in a browser based Office suite. One benefit that I forsee is that collaborative editing (example, Writely) may really take off (people in remote locations editing the same document over the Internet), but I am sure the guys at Microsoft will find a way to include collaborative editing within Office.

Is Google falling into the Ford trap ('People can have the Model T in any color - so long as it's black.') with it's insistence on developing applications that reside in the browser? Time will tell, but my hunch is yes.

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