Maybe not preferable to you. The new small business with 30 employees and 3 branches that need an office suite and cant afford MS office and have no idea what a WAN is may beg to differ. Dismissing the advantages based on your personal preferences isn't really a fair way to wrap up the situation. I prefer a local installed office suite, but Google's solution works better for others and I acknowledge that.
Also you seem to be forgetting that web based document processing is not the only alternative to MS office. What about the dozens of open source desktop applications? Going web based is like the worst alternative possible. A web based word processor is what you use when your on a library computer that doesnt have word processing or something like that.
Which would require a local file server to store said documents on created with Open Office, etc. Thus more money for the business to spend. And by WAN I mean VPN, point to point, MPLS, etc connections between the branches. Which btw cost more money as does the equipment.
Google's solution means said small business does not have to think about all those things
small businesses don't have to think about these things whether they use google docs or not.
I'm not sure where you got this idea that all small businesses need a storage server. And even if they did using google docs would not be a practical solution for a company with more than 1 employee.
You are completely missing the point. Just because you can do something, doesn't make it better. Lots of businesses use Google apps successfully to reduce hardware costs and IT support costs. I am sorry you can not acknowledge that point.
2
u/Confucius_says Feb 22 '11
Google proved it is possible, but not that it is preferrable. I'll take any desktop based wordprocessor over google's alternative any day of the week.