A Self Employed Look At GOOG apps vs. MSFT Office (Moments of Clarity)

I use Google's gmail and calendar exclusively, their everywhere availability and mobile friendliness gives me no desire to look elsewhere...other than down at my blackberry pearl. My family/associates can view and add events to my calendar and generally, the thing just works. Gmail is an interesting adaptation of email but it's quite capable and allows consolidation of my nearly 10 domain specific email addresses from various businesses/presences.

Outlook on the other hand has become a unwieldy behemoth trying to snatch key pieces of other greattools/technologies to maintain its status the place where corporate cubical dwellers rot. Sure most programs have a plugin for it or integrate with it somehow (click here to add this to your outlook calendar)...but in its effort to remain on top, it has bloated up with crap and sharing calendars was never quite easy enough.

However, I've tried to use google docs/presentation and I'm sorry to say it's good enough for cranking out basic text in a hassle free environment...but I find myself moving back to Word and PPT (I have office 2007) for their great new features, templates, tools, etc. An amateur like me that's trying to crank out professional looking stuff with compressed time lines needs a single source tool to get the job done. MSFT has accomplished this with Word and PowerPoint in the 2007 suite.

I know that GOOG is not trying to be MSFT with its tools...but are they only trying to capture the XX% that only use bold and italics in their documents? I along with myriad solo-preneurs cannot afford to be so bland and lifeless with content. Good work MSFT.

Next post in this series: "Hasta La Vista. Hola Mac"