It was perhaps more than a little strange to read Scott Karp’s epitaph of the Web 2.0 Summit today, in particular his description of Ray Ozzie’s presentation, in which Ozzie apparently argued “that the web as operating system is not (yet) a panacea — there are some things that offline local client applications still do better — like provide truly reliable, instantaneous applications”, on yet another day in which I’ve done almost all of my wordpro on Google Docs.
My first reaction was to warn Ozzie to step away from the bong. I’m not alone – one of my mesh partners – who for now will go unnamed – and I discussed this very issue today and he told me he’s been using the former Writely for the same purpose for months. The only time I spent on Microsoft apps today was the time it took to copy data out of them. It will not take long for this to appear on Microsoft’s bottom line, and the hole will not be filled with Zune sales. Also, perhaps less well reported is the issue that this is not just a Microsoft issue. For ages now I also haven’t used any outliners, spreadsheets or similar tools. There is a entire constellation of smaller developers that are going to get hammered by this.
All Google, all the time.