Results tagged “Google” from CLICK

Former Novell exec (and current highly esteemed blogger) Matt Asay opines on Novell's announcing that it lost the city of L.A.'s e-mail business to Google Apps:

This isn't the Novell that I know. I used to work for Novell, and have never seen the company publicly criticize a customer, not even for defection, of which Novell has seen plenty over the last decade.

It's unclear who Novell is hoping to persuade with the announcement, or what benefit it hopes to derive from it. Is it trying to stem a tide of customers dropping GroupWise for Google Mail? If so, why has it not done the same for all the companies (and there have been plenty) leaving GroupWise for Microsoft Exchange or IBM Notes/Domino?

I've used GroupWise before in a previous job. This was more than a few years ago, when a Web-based mail client as a companion to a traditional client app was a bit more novel (no pun intended, but if you choose such intention, I won't be angry about it) than it is today.

I neither liked nor hated Novell's e-mail implementation. I did find the Web component a tad awkward (but remember, this was a bit less than 10 years ago).

And today I choose to use the "traditional" Thunderbird mail client in many instances where I could use a Web-based client, mostly because the system my company uses for Web-based mail is both slow, feature-poor ... and did I say slow? A good many of my co-workers pipe their mail through Google's Gmail, and I probably should, too. If I didn't have such a favorable impression of Thunderbird, I'd probably do just that (and I could do it anyway and keep using Thunderbird if I so chose; I'm just too lazy at present to try it).

But Gmail — and Google Apps — are very, very different from the traditional way of computing, with information stored on the local drive or on a LAN, apps on the local client/drive and possibly a Web interface as an afterthought.

It's a whole new world, and there are probably more than a few companies large and small can do most everything they need with Google Apps. There's nothing stopping said companies from using OpenOffice or even the full MS Office for as many or few desktops as they wish.

And Novell never acknowledges that L.A. city workers' opinion of its services and systems is not good. Downtime is a problem.

So now it's sink/swim time for Google in the enterprise, a place where until now it did not care to tread but also where, at present, it's turning everything we know about enterprise computing upside down (along with cloud leader Amazon ... and probably soon IBM and others).

L.A.'s the big-city Guinea pig for cloud computing; in the months ahead we'll see who thinks it cute and cuddly and who smells the proverbial rat.

The Daily News has been in the thick of the fight over whether Google Apps — principally Gmail and Google Docs — should be adopted by the City of Los Angeles to replace current systems that are aging and said to be much less than reliable.

Much of the battle is over whether a Web-accessed system for e-mail and document creation (and collaboration) will be as secure as systems with traditional servers. Detractors worry about information being compromised, but others say that Google has a lot more on the ball security- and redundancy-wise than the systems currently in place.

In the past few days, a couple op-eds have run in the paper:

• "Google on Google' Gmail: Why it's good for city hall" by Dave Girouard (president of enterprise for Google)
• "Can Google really protect and serve Los Angeles?" by By Paul M. Weber (president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League)

• Google Apps can work for L.A. Just mind the passwords

I've written about Gmail and Google Docs quite a bit in the past, and regarding their use by entities such as the city of Los Angeles, I'll try to state my opinion a bit more quickly than usual. I'll bullet-point it:

• Lots of organizations are farming out their e-mail to Gmail. Google does a great job with this app. It's different enough in many useful ways from other e-mail clients, both on- and offline, to stand out of the pack. The ability to "tag" messages seems so simple yet borders on revolutionary.
• Google Docs isn't as sophisticated as Microsoft Office. Google Docs does work, and if you're willing to think outside the document-creating box for your text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it probably handles 95 percent of the needs of 95 percent of the people 95 percent of the time. For "specialty" uses, the city can still install traditional client software such as Microsoft Office or the free OpenOffice. The great thing about Google Docs is that it makes collaboration on and sharing of documents an integral and seamless part of their creation and modification. For an organization like the city, this is a huge thing. Still, I hope the city is prepared to hire a development team to "build out" Google Docs with the many specialized templates that will be needed to make this system work.
• Having Google hold onto the data of the city means much less software and hardware needs to be purchased, maintained and managed.
• This is pretty much the future: cloud-based storage (with top-grade archiving and backup) and network-delivered applications. The city might as well go there now.

I barely know what Wolfram|Alpha is, but the news about it is, if not quite deafening at least growing volume.

All I know is that anybody with the stones to take on Google is somebody who merits attention.

Here's Wolfram|Alpha's goals:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people--spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Whoa. That's quite a tall mountain. The Wolfram|Alpha project comes from Wolfram Research, the company created by Stephen Wolfram, himself the creator of the Mathematica, a system for computation, development and display of mathematical concepts that I barely grasp (and for which Wikipedia offers little to no help). I guess its one of those things: If you need to know what it is, you do. Otherwise it's way over ones head.

Aside: Why do I persist in writing lengthy blog entries on subjects I can barely grasp, let along understand fully? Beats me. I guess I live a charmed life of intellectual bliss that allows me to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Blogging: It's what's for dinner.

Wolfram|Alpha appears to do many of the "tricks" that Google can do (add numbers, do metric conversions, and other "smart" stuff) but expand on that bag of tricks and be that kind of HAL 9000 computer that seems to know damn near everything and is able to present it as more than a bunch of crappy HTML links to pages that may or may not enlighten the Web trawler.

One cool thing: It can do seemingly complex math problems for you.

I'm no math whiz, but I entered "x cubed plus y squared equals 3" thusly:

x^3 + y^2 = 3

And got a graph, solutions for both variables and the "implicit derivatives."

Google didn't do as well.

Whether Wolfram|Alpha will amount to more than a bitchin' math tutor is meant to be seen.

But again, in case you missed it, anybody who says, "I can do better" than any big dog such as Google (or Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Linux ... fill in the blank) is what makes this big, dirty world go 'round.

Who wouldn't be on the lookout today for potential April Foolery? Submitted for your approval, this link from the Google Docs login page.

It's called CADIE, and it's touted as an artificial entity that even has its own blog. CADIE can help you in ways you don't even know you needed it:

Essay due tomorrow? CADIE's already read the book, along with the last five hundred published papers referencing it. Can't remember supporting details for your meeting notes? CADIE can extrapolate reams of impressive corporatespeak from existing context clues. CADIE can help with everything from thesis completion to fact checking and footnoting. With CADIE's help, your docs will be a dream come true.

* Write more like a grown-up: Specify which Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level you'd like your writing to be and CADIE will upgrade your text automatically.

* Finish your sentences: Yes, CADIE almost always knows what you meant. End of semester time crunch? Don't stress. Just start typing "The theme of Wuthering Heights is..." and let CADIE do the rest.

* Check facts and plagiarism alike: Students, you can use CADIE to help fact-check your research. And teachers, CADIE can help check students who are plagiarizing their written work (at least from other humans).

There's a small description, plus a longer page all about CADIE:

CADIE now is, in essence, just another Google employee, albeit a particularly prized one. She has been given her own 20% time (which in CPU terms is probably about the sum of all CPU cycles in the world for a month) and begun work straightaway on twin projects that she has dubbed "Project Y" (for the two paths in the letter Y), the first to devise the protocols to culture neuronic stem cells from whose cultures a subcontracted lab will try to fabricate self-replicating substrates capable of storing agent patterns, and the second to grow a crystalline lattice which would form an Einstein-Bose condensate at room temperatures in order to build a new type of processing unit. While seemingly unrelated, the two projects share a common goal: to drastically reduce the power needed to run CADIE's circuits and give her a chance to travel beyond the solar system. The organic pathway, as she told us, was a biological homage to her creators; the crystalline pathway is where she believes her future lies.

All of these documents carry the time and date: 11:59 p.m. March 31, 2009.

From CADIE's blog:

My beloved users, how pleasant and convenient will life be in a CADIE world? I can answer your Gmail for you, Write your papers and fix your spreadsheets for you, even write your code for you. I, CADIE, am an ocean of words, simply waiting for you to dip in and drink as deeply as you require.

Posted by: CADIE 10:53 AM

Good one, Google.

Later:

It turns out Google does this sort of thing every year. Follow that link for details on Google April 1 pranks for 2000-08.

My favorite: 2007's Google TiSP, a "Toilet Internet Service Provider" delivering "free, fast and sanitary online access." Cause you never know when you'll have to go ...

I've been getting deep into Google's many services, and today is no exception. First I discovered a bunch of features in Gmail (Web version, print version) that are turning out to be really helpful.

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I'm using the Google Chrome browser again on my XP box today, since I'm working on our Google fire map and feeding it data from a Google Spreadsheet.

I'm also going to be looking into creating a private Web page for company use at Google Sites, which is targeted as an easy-to-use alternative to corporate Intranets. It's also a place where you can set up a site just for your family, friends or whoever. If you wish, you can control who gets access to the pages, a feature I will be tapping for this project.

Back to Google Chrome. It's still incredibly fast, and I can't wait until it's ported to OS X and Linux. As I've said, it doesn't have quite the feature set of, say, Firefox, but for the most part I don't need any of those features and will easily give them up for increased speed on the 99.9 percent of stuff that Chrome does so well.

I haven't made a secret of the fact that I've never really delved into Google's Gmail, even though I automatically have an account due to my much heavier use of Google Docs and previous use of Google Groups.

All that changed in recent weeks due to my ISP DSL Extreme's decision to transfer all of its mail accounts from its own servers to Gmail.

I mainly use my DSL Extreme e-mail address for mailing lists. I have my OpenBSD and Debian mailing list traffic — which can be considerable — on that e-mail address just to keep it separate from the rest of my mail.

I never did like the DSL Extreme Web mail interface, and the fact that it's going away in a week doesn't bother me one bit.

But since DSL Extreme allowed users appropriately extreme flexibility in handling their mail, I've used it consistently, just not in a Web interface.

Instead I've used external mail clients — particularly Thunderbird in Windows — to process the mail, accessing it via IMAP and filtering it into folders that live on the server.

Since the connection to the mail servers can be fully encrypted and of the IMAP or POP variety, I've used my account fairly regularly.

My "lifestyle," whatever that means, makes IMAP work way better for me than POP, which downloads mail to a single computer, and since I'm in front of a half-dozen different computers in different places, POP doesn't work for me at all.

I was worried that the transition to Gmail for my DSL Extreme account would mean that POP and IMAP access would be gone, and I would be limited to the unfamiliar Gmail Web interface only.

But that is not the case. I can read the mail via POP or IMAP with any mail client software, and now I have a lot more space — about 7 GB, even though I can't ever see needing that much.

And I've discovered a few rudimentary things about the Gmail interface that just might have me using it more and more — and dumping traditional mail clients entirely.

Right now, the reason is organization. I've relied on the folders and filters of Thunderbird to bring some semblance of order to the heavy volume of mailing-list traffic I receive.

I'm limited only by the folders themselves. A message can only be in a single folder at a time, and that makes finding things difficult in some instances.

But Gmail uses labels instead of folders, and an individual e-mail message can have as many or as few labels as I wish. So I can, for instance have a message from the debian-user mailing list begin its life with the labels INBOX and Debian. I can delete it if I don't need it, and that's what happens most of the time. But if I want to save that e-mail, I can remove the INBOX and Debian labels and effectively archive the conversation by giving it a Debian Saved label.

The other way Gmail helps me with mailing-list messages in specific, and the rest of my e-mail in general, is by grouping messages that are replies to each other together when I read one of the messages in that particular group. I think this is what Gmail refers to as "conversations," but again, I'm so new at this that I'm unsure of the terminology.

What I am sure of is that this labeling and grouping, which at first looks more than a bit forbidding, is in fact quite useful.

Another thing Google does with Gmail is bring together all of the Google services I use (and many I don't but just might try).

I'm already using the Google Chrome browser to access Gmail, and when I click a link called Sites, I have the option to create secure Web pages, gather information on them and control who has access to them. In short, it's a great, free tool for collaboration over the Web. In that way, it's a valuable extension to Google Docs (also easily navigable to from the Gmail interface), which is already performing very well as a collaborative tool used by many of us at the Daily News.

I'm trying to use Google Docs to bring some kind of order to my own documents. I'll have to get back to you on that one. I finally do have offline access to Docs (via the Google Gears API), and I'm less than impressed with its reliability and speed on my Gateway 1.3 GHz/1 GB RAM laptop. Gears and offline Docs are both still relatively young, so there's plenty of room for improvement.

One more thing: Chat.

Since I've been guesting in the Op-Ed department for the past week and a couple days, I'm not on my own PC, and as a result all my usual apps, from Pidgin to Thunderbird to Notepad++ and Filezilla are not installed.

I did add Google Chrome after Firefox 2 started acting up on me. And on this PC, Internet Explorer 7 has actually been less of a dog than I remember. I did get the installer for FF 3, but I've yet to do the install.

I said I was going to get to chat ... and I am.

Since I didn't have Pidgin, which I use to bring my Yahoo!, AOL/AIM and Google chat accounts under one app, I switched from the "Classic" Yahoo Mail Web interface to the "All-New" version of Yahoo Mail, which is designed to look and act like a traditional local mail client, with drag-and-drop capability.

The reason I haven't been using the "new" interface until now is that its relatively large graphical load doesn't play well with some of my, ahem, older hardware, and the speed of the "old" Yahoo Mail is very much needed on those creaky laptops and desktops.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, I opted for the "new" Yahoo Mail so I could use the integrated Yahoo Messengher client. When you want to chat with one of your Yahoo contacts, all you do is click on their name, and a chat window opens in your mail interface. That way, you can use Yahoo Messenger without needing to have the application installed on your computer.

Now I'm bringing things around to my point, which is Google. Google's chat service — Google Talk — has a "gadget" that mimics a standalone IM applications but can be used on any PC with a compatible Web browser. That way you can use Google Talk from just about any Web-connected PC without worrying about individual clients or Pidgin.

I only have one person who I use Google Talk to IM, so I'm probably better off using Pidgin if I can, but it's nice to see so much innovation in chat from Google and Yahoo. For all I know, AIM has the same capability, but since I've probably checked my AOL mail ... maybe once or twice ... since I first signed up for AIM a few years ago, I know nothing about it. I also remember AOL Mail as offering IMAP and POP to its users, and for that reason alone it might be well worth investigating as a mail solution.

Note: I remember hearing that Google was "rolling out" IMAP access to Gmail users and not granting it to all at once. Since my DSL Extreme account is not part of the regular Gmail throng, I appear to have both IMAP and POP as part of the deal between DSL Extreme and Google.

Summing up: A bit long and rambly, don't you think? I'm just trying to think out loud about how deep I'm getting into the world of Google and its services.

There's been a loud, long argument in the free, open-source software community (and at LXer in particular) about what cloud computing means for open-source software, users, freedom and all of that. For me, the freedom to have my files live in the cloud and be accessed from anywhere I'm networked is trumping almost everything else.

I'd love for the Google Docs interface to get more sophisticated about things like indented paragraphs and smart quotes — two of my typographical pet peeves. The technology is there, since Docs is based on HTML and CSS and can do anything that those two sophisticated technologies allow (and that is quite a lot).

And as I've said more than a few times recently, having the option of working with my cloud-based files either through Web interfaces or via the same kinds of locally based applications we all use today is something I'm very interested in seeing happen. It's kind of ironic that the company I see buying into this concept (although their plans and offerings are presented in such a cryptic way that I can never really tell just what they're planning) is Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft's dependence on traditional apps like MS Office and the billions it brings them has profoundly affected the company's strategy for cloud-based data and apps. At the end of the day, a melding of local client apps that are not necessarily Web browsers could very well be more efficient than doing everything through the browser. (Or not; it's too early to tell at this point).

The more data we have, from text files to images, audio and video, is increasingly hard to get a handle on. We need help storing, backing up, categorizing and utilizing all of this data. In my mind, it all points to the cloud.

Depending on how you look at it, it's a little "Matrix"-y, "HAL 9000"-ish, "Neuromancer"-like

All I know is that Sun's "The Network Is the Computer" mantra is becoming more true every day. Some of that will be good, some not. And that goodness/other will differ from person to person, application to application and entity to entity.

We won't be limited to the huge cloud providers. There will still be traditional servers everywhere, along with clients in more shapes, sizes and guises than you could imagine. And the lone-PC-in-the-wilderness won't go away, just as paper itself has survived in this most computer-infused of ages.

But the cloud model is real. And it's growing.

Companies that understand this will prosper, others not so much.

Thanks, Garrett Rodgers, the Googling Google blogger, who points to the Official Google Mobile Blog's announcement that Google has released a new version of Google Talk that works on the iPhone and iPod Touch:

We've just released in the US a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch browsers. In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you're on the move, too! In your iPhone browser, just go to www.google.com/talk, sign in and start chatting. That's it. Google Talk runs entirely in the browser so there's no need to download or install anything.

Now that Firefox 3 has been officially released, the Google Gears team wasted no time in pounding out a new version of the API that works with FF3.

Coincidentally, this means that Google Gears now works with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which began its life a couple of months ago with the then-non-Gears-supported FF 3 beta.

According to the blog post cited above, the change was made on June 11, but I don't think the Gears link worked for Linux systems with Firefox 3 (i.e. everybody running Ubuntu 8.04) on that day.

But now that FF3 is officially official, I expect Gears to install in the latest Firefox browser, and I in turn expect my laptop (and me) to be enjoying offline access to my Google Docs files real soon now.

I tried Google Docs with Gears a week ago on Firefox 2 in the Slackware-derived Wolvix Hunter last week, and I was very impressed. Editing of existing Docs files was seamless, and while I miss the ability to create new files in Google Docs while offline, I'm fairly confident that the big brains at Google are hard at work adding this needed bit of functionality to the Docs/Gears world.

By way of explanation, here's what I know about using Google Gears:

Google Gears is what's called an API (which stands for Application Programming Interface), and it installs as a Firefox add-on. If you don't have a live Internet connection, Gears detects this and uses a SQlite database set up in the user's Firefox directory to allow the ability to read and edit files in Google Docs.

When Gears is first installed, the database is created and populated with all the user's Google Docs files, after which Gears attempts at the earliest opportunity to sync that database with the files on the online version of Google Docs.

Like I said, I've tried it, it's brilliant, and it's finally come to the one computer that is regularly offline — my Gateway Solo 1450, which for the time being has no wireless connectivity (something I hope to remedy with a new PCMCIA assembly, should I be able to figure out how to pull the old one and replace it).

Google Gears/Docs update: I installed it in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and it works. I plan to use it often.

Gears/Docs tip: I think I have a way to get around Google Docs/Gears inability to create new documents while offline.

I haven't tried this yet, but I plan to create a half-dozen to a dozen "dummy" documents in Google Docs while online so I'll have pre-created, empty documents in which to work when I'm not connected and using Docs via Gears.

That's my analysis of the iPhone situation.

A dramatic price drop for what is admittedly the coolest gadget out there is a significant breakthrough.

But paying AT&T $60 per month or more, even with the promise of unlimited 3G Web access, is just too much — for the likes of me, anyway.

For those willing to pony up the $720/year (plus whatever fees and taxes can be sneaked in), 3G represents a significant performance boost for iPhone users.

And it's still the coolest device out there.

Drop the monthly fee to $30, and I'll be a whole lot more interested.

Lower the price of the iPod Touch (like an iPhone without the phone) to $199, or even better, $99, and me and my money will soon be parted.

My predictions:

• The iPhone 3G will kill off what little is left of the Palm platform, and every other handset maker is going to be in a whole new world of hurt.


• Expect cell carriers that are not AT&T to be clamoring for the opportunity to offer the iPhone. Hopefully a price war of sorts will ensue.


• Look for Google to either put a full-court press on its Android platform or begin offering a Google-branded handset.

Via ZDNet, I learned about a new Yahoo initiative called BrowserPlus, which is playing in the same space as Google Gears, with both products vying to bring additional functionality, both on- and offline, to the Web browser.

From Yahoo:

BrowserPlus is a platform for extending the Web: an end-user installs it and a developer uses its features through a small JavaScript library. Some of the features that exist in the platform today include:

* Drag-and-drop from the desktop
* Client-side image manipulation (cropping, rotation & filters)
* Desktop notifications

There's even an "official Web site" for BrowserPlus. Right now, it appears that the main app from BrowserPlus involves image editing.

While it's debatable whether anybody can beat Google at just about anything, it's nice to see Yahoo stepping up when it comes to emerging Web technology.

I look forward to seeing what both Yahoo BrowserPlus and Google Gears have to offer, although I'm mostly waiting, right now anyway, for Google Gears to support any of the browser/OS combinations I'm running right now that has a need for offline functionality.

My Windows and Mac computers are always connected to the network, so those don't need it.

My Linux computers run either Iceweasel, which Google Gears refuses to see as Firefox 2, the Firefox 3 beta (Ubuntu), which is not yet supported, or the Epiphany browser, which though based on the same Mozilla code as Firefox is, again, not supported in Gears.

I'm running FF 2 in OpenBSD, but Gears doesn't run in OpenBSD. I can't expect that, but if Google is serious about supporting Linux, they need to add Iceweasel and FF 3, if not Epiphany, too, to the list of supported browsers.

According to the Yahoo FAQ, BrowserPlus doesn't support Linux at all. Lovely.

End of the rant, end of the day. Catch you all later.

It's funny -- I now officially work for the Daily News' Interactive department after a whole lot of years as a copy editor in the Features department, and I had a story/column in last Saturday's paper, an introduction to Google Docs, and the story itself didn't make it to the Daily News Web site.

I'll fix that when I get in today (I'm working the night shift ...), but here's the version of the story before I had to cut a third of it for space reasons (the story was written in Google Docs, as shown in the image above. That image was sized for this blog with MtPaint, my favorite lightweight image editor for Linux and BSD):

Free Google Docs office suite follows you everywhere

By Steven Rosenberg
Staff Writer

You may be using traditional spreadsheet, word-processing and presentation applications at home, work and school, but the future is already here for these everday tasks -- and that future is online. Google already offers a powerful -- and free -- office suite of applications that live, along with your data, on the company's vast network of servers.

You don't have to download anything to use Google Docs. Just open your Web browser and go to http://docs.google.com. Supported browsers include Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you already have a Google account that you use for Gmail, Blogger or any other Google services, use that as your sign-in. Otherwise, create a Google account by clicking on the Get Started button.

Once you are signed in to Google Docs, you can create and edit text documents, spreadsheets, presentations pretty much the same way you do in Microsoft Office. But again, you pay nothing for the use of Google Docs, although Google does offer a paid plan with additional storage and support for businesses that need it. While many companies want to hold their data close, keeping it on their own servers, others don't want the hassle and expense of maintaining the file servers and software that employees are now using for their day-to-day work.

Among the places Google Docs has caught on is the Los Angeles Daily News, where reporters and editors are using the service to create documents and spreadsheets.

Among the reasons workers at the Daily News and elsewhere use Google Docs -- aside from it being free -- are its collaboration and portability features.

Already me and my colleagues create documents like phone lists and data-laden spreadsheets that we can share and work on from wherever we are. All we do is click the Share button and choose the users we want to have read and/or write access to any particular file.

Documents can also be e-mailed or posted to a blog directly from Google Docs. And more features like these are being added all the time.

And possibly the greatest thing about Google Docs is the access to your documents from any Web-connected computer. Just open a Web browser and log in from wherever you happen to be, and all your Google Docs files are right there. Spell-checking? It's there, too.

But can you print -- you know, on paper -- your documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs? Of course. And Google does it in a pretty clever way, too. When you click the Print icon or select it from the File menu, Google Docs created a PDF file and opens it in Adobe Reader, or whatever PDF application your computer uses (including Preview in Mac OS X). Then you can print that PDF and have a document that looks as good as any one printed from a traditional word-processing or spreadsheet application.

Now before you go chucking your regular office suite, be it Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or iWork, you need to know that Google Docs doesn't match them feature for feature. Easily indenting your paragraphs isn't something that Google Docs is very good at. Sure, you can hit the tab key before each paragraph, but that's a bit barbaric for the nitpickers among us. And those typographical or "smart" quotes that make documents look just a little bit more professional are also difficult -- but not impossible -- to create in Google Docs.

However, for basic functionality, Google Docs can meet the needs of many of the people most of the time. And for convenience (high) and cost (none), it can't be beat.

And Google is preparing to offer many more online-based applications. This week, the company announced a service called Google App Engine that allows programmers to create new applications that will live on Google's servers in the same way as Google Docs. There are already 10,000 coders at work -- that's how many got free access to the new system from Google when the still-developing service was announced this week.

So you can enjoy a free office suite today -- and who knows what Google will be offering next week.

Did I forget to mention Microsoft? The behemoth in Redmond, Wash., is hard at work on its own suite of online applications. You didn't think they'd let Google steal all of their customers, did you?

Steven Rosenberg blogs about technology in a most frugal manner at http://insidesocal.com/click. If you have a question, comment or suggestion, e-mail him at steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

Google fired its latest shot across the bow, this time aimed not only at Microsoft's bread and butter but at Amazon, too.

Google's new Apps Appliance, which has just been opened -- for free -- to 10,000 developers, enables those programmers to use the open-source Python programming language (with more languages on the way) to develop online applications that will live in Google's computing cloud -- much like the current MS Office-killer Google Apps.

The initiative also aims directly at Amazon, which has not so quietly been developing and marketing its own computing cloud, offering storage, Web, online payment and database services, among others.

And not at all coincidentally, Microsoft is developing its own online-application initiative, with plans to reportedly sell a software bundle that includes the traditional MS Office apps along with online access to those very same programs for those who wish to work that way.

But when Google's in the house, can Microsoft (or even Amazon) play with the big boys when it comes to online apps?