I said years ago that Google was the only Internet web application that I would pay to access.
More and more this is becoming the case.
Google? Check.
Google Personalized Home Page? Check.
Google News? Check (one of a few sources).
Gmail? Check.
Contact list? Gmail. Check.
Google Desktop? Check.
Google Calendar? Evaluating.
OK, for many people, how do they use the Internet?
Browser: free options.
Email: Free email clients or web mail.
Video: plug ins.
Pictures: Flickr and the like.
For me the biggest thing was calendars. I'd evaluate one here and there, then I heard Google had one in the works and I waited.
Google Internet disk storage (GDrive) is in the works.
The GDrive service will provide anyone (who trusts Google with their data) a universally accessible network share that spans across computers, operating systems and even devices. Users will no longer require third party applications to emulate this behaviour by abusing Gmail storage.
And the Open Document Format for Office Applications may turn out to be real:
Name
OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC.
Statement of Purpose
The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:
- it must be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
- it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
- it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
- it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools,
- it should keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other, and
- it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted.
OH, now if that really kicks off....
OK, someone stop me. I'm drinking the Kool-Aid.
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