Timed with the release of their web-based presentation application (aka, Presently), Google just published this video which does an awesome job of explaining one of the big problems that their Google Docs suite of programs aims to solve:
Everyone is eager to compare “Google Office” with Microsoft Office, and while I feel that comparison is inevitable, I also think it’s misguided. I don’t believe Google Docs will ever compete feature-for-feature with MS Office. Nor should it.
Being web-based, Google Docs has some big advantages over the stuck-on-the-desktop MS Office. Most importantly (as described in the video), it offers some pretty impressive collaboration tools that are really hard to duplicate in Office. I hope, and think, they’ll continue with this theme by finally integrating the JotSpot wiki into their web application suite. I think that would be the point where people would end the product to product comparison and realize that Google Docs is a much more than an Office replacement.
I keep thinking that these web apps would be perfect in a K-12 education setting. Let kids really collaborate on a project while giving the teacher comment rights and a revision history of who did what when. That’s pretty hard to beat. What do you think EduTech?