Ian Lewis' Blog

I came across this website called Zoho which has a lot of interesting web apps like Google's web apps. Google has Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Zoho has docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Google has Google notebook. Zoho has a notebook. Google has gmail. Zoho has Zoho mail. Google has... well you get the idea.

All that stuff is well and good but the thing that caught my eye was the Zoho creator and the Zoho DB & Reports. Granted, Google has it's own things like a neat little chart api(on the right) but nothing like Zoho's DB and integrated report creator that I know of. Google Base seems built for an entirely different purpose. Granted that the Zoho DB and Reports are not going to rival any enterprise reporting software but would provide you with an easy to use reporting tool for small to <the step above small (not medium)> sized databases.

Anyway, the possibilities seemed interesting for an online set of integrated applications like Zoho has. Especially the DB, App creator, and Spreadsheets but I'm sure you could think of powerful ways to integrate the other things like TODO and e-mail. The problem is that Zoho hasn't integrated these (yet?). The Zoho creator, though billed as a way to "Create Database Applications", is not integrated with the DB. When you create an app, and with it, a form and a view in the creator, the database and tables don't show up in the database app. *scratches head* Isn't integrating these two obvious? It would be cool to have an application with a database that you could then load in Zoho Database and create reports etc. But alas, the creator is a stand alone.

The integration issues combined with bugs in the creator when saving data, when saving text other than english, and when accessing using a Japanese phone, all are pretty much show-stoppers for me using it. It seems like it's so close, but missing some critical pieces. They may be adhering to the release early, release often philosophy and they are definitely sticking to the "release early" part. I just hope they stick to the "release often" part.

Somewhat recently, Google released their online version of Microsoft Word and Excel. Essentially, it is a document editor that can import and export various formats and allow editing of documents on the web. I originally thought that the AJAX approach of Google Docs could never touch the feature set, speed, and usability of a native application. After all, documents can be big, and native applications like Word, and Open Office have huge feature sets that couldn't possibly be replicated easily and efficiently on the web using AJAX.

So I thought. But in reality Google has replicated many of the important features in Word and Excel already with surprisingly good results. But even still that's missing the point. The point is being able to manage all of the documents for you and/or your organization collaboratively online. And then once finished being able to publish the results to the web. The power of such an idea only hit me fully today. Once you publish it on the web, your users and customers can view it. If you were able to integrate this functionality into your organization, namely writing documents online collaboratively and publishing the results to the web, think of the things you could do with such functionality. You could release financial data and reports this way. You could release and manage revisions of software documentation this way. Many things are possible with this approach.

Managing revisions of anything is a hard task. Maintaining what versions of the software are installed where and what versions are published is an annoying and hard task to manage. This sort of approach would make it easy. Publishing documents on the internet this way could allow customers and/or users to view new documentation or new versions of documentation from your organization's website instantly. I feel that, more and more, integrating standards based applications to create working systems that help people manage their businesses (including publishing) and access data from anywhere via the internet is where the future will be heading.

I'm not sure how much of all the great new things Google is putting out were the result of Google's own inventiveness or whether Google simply read the writing on the wall (which is not such an easy task itself) but it's exciting to see the new companies direction first hand as many of the applications are available for free for essentially non-commercial use.

Google of course wishes to remain an innovator but history has shown that companies, just like people grow up and gain responsibilities (to employees and customers) like people gain responsibilities to their families and that the innovation really rests in the hands of those who are young and free to explore their whims. I just hope that Google can maintain it's innovation well into the future. It's quite amazing to watch.