David Berlind has a series of interesting posts about Google apps versus Microsoft Office; the series starts here, more or less. Today there’s a related post from Dan Farber, who reports Microsoft’s claim (from Jeff Raikes) that there is little demand for Microsoft Office in the cloud.

Cloud-based applications have huge advantages – easy collaboration, zero install – but it happens that for me, there is little incentive to use Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets or the like. Cloud storage is more important than cloud applications. Cloud storage solves several problems including anywhere access and off-site backup. I also use an internet-based subversion repository that gives me document history. But I don’t need to use cloud applications in order to benefit from cloud storage. When out and about I usually work on my own laptop, not in internet cafes or on other people’s PCs. 

When I first saw Amazon S3 I knew immediately that it would be useful to me. When I saw Docs and Spreadsheets (and its predecessors like Writely), I was greatly impressed but had little reason actually to use the applications.

I am speaking personally because this will not be true for everyone. For some, the collaboration and zero install benefits of cloud apps will be more significant than they are for me. Further, these online applications are also an easy route to cloud storage; I realise that not everyone wants to mess around with S3 or Subversion. There is friction in having to think about where to save a document. With online applications that friction is removed.

What if Microsoft made cloud storage as seamless in Office as it is in Google Docs and Spreadsheets? It is surprising that an option to save to Windows Live is not built into Office 2007. Of course there is Sharepoint, whichI presume is the underlying platform for Live storage, and there is Groove, but the average home or small business user won’t have these set up. There are a couple of mysterious options in Word, under the Publish menu, for saving to a Document Management Server or creating a Document Workspace. They don’t do much out of the box. There is no wizard to help users create a new free Live account, with extra space and features for subscribers, for example.

There is also the question of bloat, which Berlind considers here and here. This is one of those things you don’t care about, until you do. I don’t care about bloat if an app performs well and the unneeded features are not in my way. I do care when it turns into an Outlook 2007 debacle. You run Outlook; then you run Thunderbird; and you see the downside of bloat. Word and Excel? Not an issue right now, they hum along fine.

So what does next-gen Office look like? Is it an improved Docs and Spreadsheets? Or Microsoft Office/Open Office plus cloud storage? I’m interested in opinions.

Google Web History has two main benefits.  First, it enables smarter search. Google can take account of which pages you visited, presumably giving greater weight to sites where you viewed numerous pages rather than diving in and out quickly. Second, you get a nice Google-ised search of pages you’ve viewed, instead of attempting to find what you want in the history list of links, in IE or Firefox.

So why not? First, because Google has enough of my data already. I use Google for search, because I find it the best search engine more often than not. I use a Gmail account occasionally. I use Adsense. I’m experimenting with Docs and Spreadsheets. That will do.

Don’t I trust Google? Sort-of. It has a good track record, as far as I know. And it is not that I have anything particularly to hide. Still, the AOL disaster last year was a warning flag. And I do read the privacy policies, and don’t find them reassuring.

There’s a second reason. To sign up for full Web History, you need to install the Google Toolbar. This is how Google gets a record of pages you visit beyond your searches. However, I have a minimalist approach to add-ons, especially those which run all the time. My reward is a more stable and better-performing operating system. So I would need a strong reason to install the Toolbar, and I don’t have one.

There’s more. When you are invited to install the Toolbar, you are given an opportunity to read Google’s terms of service. Despite its generally excellent usability elsewhere, the big Goog doesn’t make it easy to read this document. The terms of service are in a narrow scrolling window. I recommend that that you Select All, Copy, and then Paste into your word processor. It comes to 14 pages in Word:

Except – here’s something strange. If you get to this page in FireFox, you get the general terms of service as mentioned above. If you get to this page in IE, you get a different document, which is for the Google Updater and the Google Pack:

The document is actually shorter than the general terms, but not good news if you like to keep control of your PC:

The Software may communicate with Google servers and/or Third Party servers from time to time to check for available updates to the Software, such as bug fixes, patches, enhanced functions, missing plug-ins and new versions (collectively, “Updates”). By installing the Software, you agree to automatically request and receive Updates.

There’s a similar clause in the general terms, but without the reference to third parties. Further, in this document you agree to stuff from Adobe, Real, Skype, Symantec and others. In practice I’m sure you can install the toolbar without all these other pieces, but still … this is a big red flag from my perspective.

As an aside, I wonder if corporate legal departments ever make the connection between what employees may be agreeing to online, and their normal legal policy? Put another way, what if I copy this agreement into an email, fire it across to legal, and ask, “Is it OK if I agree to this?” Complete with some wide-ranging indeminities, limitations of liability, non-warranties, and in some cases, the right to install stuff on your computer without asking again?

Bottom line: I’ll live without Google web history.

Or at least the semi-real world: Wired’s Michael Calore spent a month working (mostly) with Google apps rather than his usual desktop software (on a Mac). I’ve thought of trying this same experiment myself but haven’t yet felt that it is worth the risk.

A few points interested me. First, that he could live with the apps themselves, but ran into interoperability problems. One that surprised me:

One of our copy editors couldn’t open some docs I had exported, so I was forced to copy and paste those articles into Microsoft Word just for her.

I’d have thought the other way (Word to Google) would be more difficult, because of missing features. And Google’s response (product manager Jonathan Rochelle):

It works best when everybody in the group is sharing on the same platform,” he says. “The experience you’d have if you were just sharing stored docs rather than your co-workers asking you to save down to the desktop would be much closer to ‘Wow, this is an incredible product’ instead of ‘Wow, this really stinks’.

Oh, so if we all use Google we will be fine. That’s no better than Microsoft telling us all to use Office. Nevertheless I take the point to some extent – this web collaboration thing really only works if everyone plays. That doesn’t excuse the compatibility issues.

Calore mentions the privacy aspect, but more needs to be said here. I have no problem with internet storage; for example, I’m happy to save stuff to Amazon S3 without worrying that Jeff Bezos will start poking through the data. In fact, I consider S3 more secure than just saving files to a typical Linux box out on the Internet, especially shared hosts. Google troubles me though, because its business model is contextual advertising and you agree to let it mine your data, albeit with self-imposed limitations.

Finally there’s the question of whether the apps themselves are good enough. Again, I’d have liked Calore to have said more about this, though he reports how much he misses drag-and-drop. The impression I get is that the browser-based apps were a bit frustrating, but he says:

Eventually, I learned to accept that the browser had certain performance limitations that I would have to live with in exchange for the convenience of centralized storage and easy access. Rochelle says it’s just the way our brains are wired from decades of using desktop apps.

Calore has missed a point here – you can have centralized storage and easy access without necessarily using browser-based apps. Moving the server to the cloud is spot-on, but the case for solely browser-based apps is weaker. Its main advantage is zero install; but that’s the way desktop apps are going as well.