Google Office

I know, I know, I know…I keep blathering on and on about Google. I can’t help it; when Google sneezes, I get a cold. I have to watch what Google is doing closely if I’m going to do my job.

The newest Google news, via Steve Rubel‘s Micro Persuasion blog, is that the search engine company bought Writely, a web-based word processor. Google’s accumulation of productivity applications–they’re rumored to be devloping a calendar program to integrate with Gmail and their Google Base service could be the foundation for an online database/spreadsheet application–lends further evidence that Google wants to be the utility of the Internet age.

As I’ve suggested several times before, Google’s forays into online storage suggest a mobile future were they will host our data on their massive servers in order to allow us access to it from any device. With broadband adoption more than 50% now in the US, that ubiquitous mobile computing future is getting closer and closer to reality.

All Google needs now is a PowerPoint type of application to make their productivity suite complete. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them snap up a company like thumbstacks and a social bookmarking service.

The reason the online productivity applications make sense for Google is that if they are hosting your data and the idea is to be able to tap into it using any device, then you can’t be dependent upon software to access it. So Google needs to host the software, as well.

It’s a great idea but there’s one problem with hosted applications that must be solved before it really works: Autosave. They all need an autosave feature. I don’t know how many times I’ve lost an entire post because something went wrong before I remembered to save my blog post. The same principle holds true for any hosted application that requires data input.

Fix that, and it’s good to go.

Technorati tags: google | writely | google base | gdrive | google drive | thumbstacks