Interjection of a new era

Changes to the blogroll will have to wait. I'm in Cornwall, with friends, and I've hit a dull spot in the day. Fortunately, there's a wireless network here and I brought my laptop. Just as fortunately, our friends believe using a family member's first name as a WEP key is secure. Not that they wouldn't have let me log on regardless, but there's this additional frisson of delight brought on by my l33t haxx0r skillz.

On to the meat....

Until this year, the promise of Web computing had never really come to fruition as far as mundane desktop tasks go. Database access and file archiving were successes, as was whiteboard collaboration to a lesser degree, but until Google released Google Spreadsheets there had been no clear competitor for Microsoft Office apps. Google Spreadsheets lets you create and collaborate in spreadsheets, and I can't say how good it is because Excel was and is a superb product, and one I use to the exclusion of all other spreadsheets.

Microsoft Word, however, has its bloat and security flaws, and Google has just produced Writely to compete with it. Will it fly? Who knows? But it's worth playing with. I bet it doesn't hide chunks of previous documents and private info like Microsoft Word docs can.

I have more nifty Web stuff to relate, but it's home on my desktop. I'll cover that next.