Gmail is lame compared to Outlook 2000. (It also broke self-hosted email for everyone.) Likewise Google Docs can’t hold a candle to Office 2000 (or even Word Perfect 6.1). It has extremely bare-bones control over text formatting and page layout. E.g. no kerning, limited styling, no footnote styles, limited control of header/footer formatting, no section breaks, etc. No section breaks! The version of Word Perfect I installed from a stack of floppy discs had section breaks!
Microsoft's web apps are a grim reminder of how desktop UIs have evolved backwards. (I’m in the midst of evaluating Office 365 as part of some IT transitions at work.) It's missing tons of features even compared to Word 2000. And it's a total pig. I thought Office was a pig before, but moving it to the Web made everything 10x worse. (Google Docs is less of a pig, but that seems to be because it has less functionality than Gobe Productive on BeOS.)
I’ll concede that Google Maps is better than what was available in 2010. It bet it would be even better if Google turned it into a Win32 desktop app.
>Microsoft's web apps are a grim reminder of how desktop UIs have evolved backwards. (I’m in the midst of evaluating Office 365 as part of some IT transitions at work.) It's missing tons of features even compared to Word 2000. And it's a total pig. I thought Office was a pig before, but moving it to the Web made everything 10x worse. (Google Docs is less of a pig, but that seems to be because it has less functionality than Gobe Productive on BeOS.)
Sure, that's all true, but this backwards devolution also ensures the important thing: that you don't really own the code you run, a centralized provider does, and they can change or break it as they please, without having to remain compatible with your machine. This is a business model problem: they've decided they do better off turning your general-purpose, user-programmable personal computer into a dumb terminal that uses 10x bloated-ass Javascript frameworks to make AJAX calls to their HTTP servers.
Microsoft's web apps are a grim reminder of how desktop UIs have evolved backwards. (I’m in the midst of evaluating Office 365 as part of some IT transitions at work.) It's missing tons of features even compared to Word 2000. And it's a total pig. I thought Office was a pig before, but moving it to the Web made everything 10x worse. (Google Docs is less of a pig, but that seems to be because it has less functionality than Gobe Productive on BeOS.)
I’ll concede that Google Maps is better than what was available in 2010. It bet it would be even better if Google turned it into a Win32 desktop app.