Upon pondering the possibility of a Google Chrome OS World, I believe the weakest link to the widespread adoption of Chrome OS is Google Docs, the web-based word processor. I hadn’t used it until recently and I was actually quite impressed. Nonetheless, it is a poor replacement for Microsoft Word for people who do heavy-duty word processing. Will this slow the adoption of Chrome OS (which will not support the installation of software)?
This is a follow up to my post about Google Chrome OS yesterday entitled, “Google Chrome OS World — Winners & Losers in the Paradigm Shift.”
Brief Evaluation of Google Docs
Overall, Google Docs falls somewhere between Wordpad and Word. I suppose I could become accustomed to drafting in Google Docs. It would be adequate for drafting basic letters but more it struggles with more complicated documents. I uploaded some documents from Word and most rendered properly. However, more complicated documents, including those with sophisticated tables and complicated layouts missed the mark.
The pull down menus are similar to those in Office builds prior to Office 2007 (which replaced the pull down menus with ribbons). Accordingly, it is easy to learn if you you are familiar with the older Office builds.
It lacks some functions that may not be commonly used in Office but are important to some. Mail Merge, for example, isn’t there. I also didn’t see a way to auto-generate a Table of Contents or Index.
Mashable’s Ben Parr recently ran a readers poll and Microsoft Office beat out Google Docs handily: 51% preferring Office, 37% preferring Google Docs and 12% voting no preference for one over the other.
Implications
Initially, Chome OS will be a netbook-only OS. I suppose that most netbooks are not used for heavy-duty word processing. For Google Docs to make the move to the desktop, however, it either needs improvements or Google needs to consider allowing Chrome OS to install other Linux software like OpenOffice.Org’s Office suite (which does not have the deficiencies mentioned above).
If Google Docs were improved sufficiently for business use, the Chrome OS World would come sooner rather than later.
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