[jstewart]

A hell of a lot of business processes are built on esoteric (and localized, as in a script sitting on a computer in the office) Excel and Access functionality - the Western Australian mining industry being a prime example.

This whole "let's move everything to the cloud" movement seems primarily to be driven by people who don't have a lot of work to do on computers besides browse websites, email, and write blog posts. They may do a lot of other work, but their computer use is fairly limited to a few tasks.

Meanwhile, business users are only going to make the jump when the multi-billion dollar companies that employ them feel comfortable having confidential information stored on a server in some other random country (i.e. probably not in my lifetime).

That's the problem Google and the other "cloud" providers have to overcome before they can claim victory - not some minimal use case like this.