For an organisation that prides itself on the crisp, uncluttered design of it’s homepage, the rest of Google’s offerings look almost thrown together. Buzz is no exception; compared to Friendfeed or Amplify, Buzz looks raw and unstructured, and I find myself shying away from using it because it’s not easy to look at.

Today, I noticed a little bit of a change – multiple items shared by the same person used to be stacked, slighty askew, on top of each other like a deck of cards; now they’re simply listed underneath the most recent item in the batch:

It’s a small change, but anything that tidies the presentation up and makes the feed easier to scan is a step in the right direction.

Am I being overly critical?  Does Google have a long way to go in the “beautiful software” race, or does function beat form every time? Let me know in the comments!

Of course, there was no way I could afford one of these mythical things, so I opted for the next best thing: the Amstrad PenPad. In January 1995, when an Apple Newton was weighing in at around £700 (a lot of money for an underpaid IT Manager!) the Amstrad PenPad could be had for less than £100. You get what you pay for, and for reasons that will become clear, it was consigned to the bottom of my work bag within a month of purchase.

The spec on this thing was amazing. For a handheld device. Of the time. Boasting 40 hours battery life, handwriting recognition for calendar, contacts, tasks, meeting notes and Other Things, the PenPad had a capacity of 330 full pages of addresses (“Full” pages, mind you!) or 6000 diary entries.

You could expand the storage (to a whopping 2mb) via a PCMCIA slot on the underside; but you were only able to write to the internal storage or the PCMCIA card; there was no dual usage. There was no wifi, so sharing was done manually – in other words: you printed stuff via the serial cable interface on the top.

The first time I turned up to a meeting packing my PenPad, my colleagues were green with envy… until, that is,  I actually tried to take notes. The handwriting recognition system still didn’t recognise my handwriting, despite hours of supposed training to get it to do just that. I’d input all of my contacts and thought the crappy recognition was all part of the device’s learning process!

After retraining the thing twice more, and even going as far as to adapt my handwriting in an effort to suit, it just wasn’t working and my Penpad’s days were numbered.

Despite it’s failings, I’ve kept it, boxed with manual and handy multi-language help stickers since then! (What can I tell you? I’m a pack rat – which is why I’ve still got a boxed copy of Windows v1.03, too!)

OK, I’ve shared my “dodgy gadget purchase” story; it’s time for you to ‘fess up and share yours – even if you bought the Sega 32x.

(thanks to China Guccio for the Newton photo, used under Creative Commons)

Another key selling point [according to Microsoft]: if you choose to use Google Apps, your formatting may be screwed up when you inevitably have to work with others who are using Microsoft Office. When all else fails, turn to FUD.

This isn’t FUD.  When it comes to collaborating with Microsoft Office users, Google Apps (and Zoho Writer, for that matter) do screw around with formatting.

Like many people today, I’m looking for work, so I’m sending my CV/résumé out several times each week to recruitment agencies.  Most recruiters and job sites will insist on having CVs sent to them in Word format, so I have to export my document as a .doc file.

And there’s the problem: a document that looks fine in Google Docs can be all over the place when it’s saved as Word document. Inconsistent tab- and line-spacing; random hieroglyphic characters in place of bullet points; disobedient font sizing are just some of the problems I’ve encountered.

It would be great to be at a point where I could simply share a link to my CV with a recruiter, a job site or an HR department, but we’re not; Microsoft’s Office document formats are still what most businesses use today. My CV is usually my first means of introduction to a prospective employer, so there’s just no way I can afford for it to look untidy – it would be like turning up to a job interview with breakfast down my jacket.

If there’s one feature that cloud-based word processors absolutely must get right, it’s making sure that exporting to the most widely-used document format works faultlessly.

Before I go any further, I want make one thing clear having been glued to Wave all day: I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration.  The thing is, it’s too far ahead of it’s time, and that’s what will hold it back from large-scale mainstream penetration, which is why Outlook is safe. For now.

I don’t want to add to the blogosphere’s echo-chamber with my own review of the hows, whys and wherefores, so instead:

• For a good taster of the technology behind Wave, I’d recommend taking a look at this article,
• If you’re after more in-depth info, straight from horse’s mouth, then the Wave developer wiki is the place to go.
• And, for a good example of how forward thinking organisations like SAP are already looking to leverage the collaborative power of Wave, take a look at the video embedded at the bottom of this post.

Again, let me be clear: I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration. The interface looks just like Gmail, except it feels slicker; this might have something to do with the Google Web-Kit front-end, but I’ll leave smarter people than me to comment on that. By way of a quick fly-by, you get your folders on the top-left, contacts on the bottom left; Inbox in the middle column; Active message (“wave”, in parlance) in the right-hand pane. New waves (messages) appear in your Inbox, just like any other email program, except, when you look closely, they’re changing. All the time.

The unread message count (circled in red) is incrementing, and new text creeps across the subtitle of the waves.

This indicates changes, made in realtime, to that wave; or new “blips” (new conversation strands) being added. Realtime, on-the-fly collaboration is quite something to watch – updates, edits and annotations appearing and changing as quickly as you can visually process them. The power of this platform hits you like a, well, like a wave crashing against the shore. Once more, lest you forget my feelings, I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration.

Ok; it looks nice; it’s feature rich and it’s generally pretty darn cool. So, why do I say Outlook is safe for a while?

I’m reasonably attuned to dealing with a realtime feed (thanks to Friendfeed), but even now there are times when I do need to hit the pause button. If I take off my rose-coloured, early-adopter geek glasses for a moment, and, instead, put on my “project manager with too many projects” glasses or my “HR advisor in the middle of a round of mass redundancies” glasses, imagining the volume of data that “regular” users are expected to act upon every day, Wave turns into a tidal surge.

Although it’s been described as email on steroids, I actually think Wave falls short right now. It’s too noisy. Where Wave does land some heavy punches is against Sharepoint – which, by the way, is a great product, if so-called implementors would take the time to refine it beyond its out-of-the-box install – creating FAQs, procedures and wiki-like pages was never, easier, more dynamic, or downright fun.

However, if I were to introduce Wave to a “regular” business with regular users as a replacement for Outlook today, those users would Freak Out. Look at today’s version of Outlook – it gives those stressed-out users the tools to control their Inbox; they can prioritise their actions and activities based on keywords, filters and search terms. (Once more, I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration.) With Wave, I can’t do that; it all pours in. What’s lacking at the moment is control and filtering of the of the incoming feed.

Yes; I understand that Wave is a preview right now, but, Wave was introduced to the world as “email, invented today”, and as such, it needs to demonstrate to decision makers in “regular” businesses that it can live up to that promise.

One last time, I think Google Wave is awesome; it is the future of email and collaboration but until Wave can give users the same sense of control, management and prioritization of their Inbox that Outlook does, I reckon Outlook is safe; but not for long.

(Footnote – my grateful thanks to Steven Hodson, whose recent post, inspired my use of the “emboldened point emphasis” in this article)

For time and again, the company has proven that despite all its talk, its offerings are as unreliable as those of any other service provider.

I do sympathise with Om and everyone else who has put their trust in Google to run their email, but we need a reality check here. Just because Google has seemingly infinite resources, it doesn’t make them immune from the kind of challenges that face IT departments in companies, large and small, all over the world.

Anyone who’s provided, implemented or supported IT services for any length of time will tell you that, no matter what risk mitigation/platform resilience measures you put in place; no matter how well you test your changes ahead of implementation; no matter how thorough your change review process, every now and then the technology will fail, something will screw up and service outages will occur.

As Om himself offered in one of his previous posts, following the last Gmail outage:

1. Get used to outages. Why? Scale forces history to repeat. As the Internet matures, we expect it to operate more smoothly, so outages make it look like you’re falling behind. But outages can also be a sign of that very maturation. Companies will learn to avoid them, then as the whole thing scales up and grows more complex, it will happen again. There will always be outages, inside the cloud and out.

I couldn’t have put better myself.

All of the items in the Top Stories section link off to their respective source sites. This might come as a shock to Mr Murdoch, but the Times isn’t my homepage; nor is the Sun. If it wasn’t for their headlines appearing on Google News on iGoogle, which is my homepage, I wouldn’t ever need to visit those sites. What else do you notice? No ads. Google aren’t monetising this page, which is another reason to question how this hurts News Corp.

Rather than look at them as some kind of competition, News Corp need to see Google and Yahoo as a (and I apologise for the 1990′s AOL reference) portal into their own content. Let Google send me to your site, and when I’m there, give me content compelling enough to make me stick around. To make matters worse, News Corp’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, has gone on record to say that “we intend to charge for all our news websites“. In the face of falling readership and advertising revenue for their physical media business, the last thing News Corp wants to be doing is putting a pay wall around their web-based content. There will always be other, free places to get the news; if not News Corp’s direct competitors, then smaller, feisty startups like BNO. Today, some of those news sources lack authority, compared to the News Corp sites; as pay walls go up, that will change.

If you were in charge of this multibillion dollar, international news and media organisation, what would you do? Does putting a pay wall around the web-based news content seem like a smart play, or are there better ways to monetise?