There has been a lot of speculation about whether Google is preparing a challenge to Microsoft’s 95% dominance of the market for word processors and other office services. It already has, but it calls it by another name — e-mail. For years, like many others, I have been looking for a word processor that does a simple job well. Microsoft’s Word may be brilliant for some but I only use a tiny fraction of its functions, and desperately want anything that takes complexity out of my life.
There is another reason. I already have a (paid-for) version of Word on my corporate laptop and another (paid-for) one at home that is used on two computers by other family members so I would be in breach of Microsoft’s rules if I put it on my new laptop as well.
So, not wishing to fork out for a third version of something I have, I looked at others. OpenOffice.org, the free open source rival to Microsoft Office, has great potential and some people, usually more technical than they let on, swear by it. But the latest, much improved version is not — yet — friendly enough for most ordinary users. I’ve tried a few free ”memo pads” but they are primitive as they do not want to provide competition for paid-for alternatives.
Recently I have been experimenting with Google’s e-mail for writing articles and have been surprised by the results. I have been a happy Yahoo user for years. It works well and attracts almost no spam if you don’t spread your e-mail address around the web. But, like Hotmail — much improved since I last used it regularly — it is a bog-standard e-mailer with no ambition to be a word processor. But then it is free.
So is Google mail — but with more bangs for your lack of bucks. Apart from 2,6GB of storage (far more than Yahoo and Hotmail), it offers plain text or a rich text mode. The latter has seven fonts and four type sizes (including huge) plus colour, bold, italic, indenting, justification and quite a good spell checker.
It also has a link button of the kind you get on blogs, which inserts a hypertext link to a website behind a word you have highlighted without the need to type in any code. The only thing it seriously lacks is a word counter.
It has the weakness of other e-mail services, in that if you move away from the screen, or press the wrong button, your text sometimes disappears. But Google mail now has an ”autosaver” that automatically saves it to draft every three to six minutes. If you want to be sure, you can press the save now button or send it regularly as an e-mail to your own address, giving you a record of earlier drafts — very useful for writers. There is no worry about storage space as Google seems to expand its already huge limit quicker than most people can use it up. I have hundreds of e-mails, including audio files and images, but have yet to reach 2% of my limit.
The only serious gripe is that too often, a message pops up saying the system was unable to perform an operation and urging you to try a few seconds later. But it is still in beta and bugs will presumably be ironed out by the time the final version is rolled out.
I have been so impressed with Google’s 2,6MB of storage (paid for by adverts generated by the context of the e-mail texts) that I have opened up other accounts. They act as a backup for image and audio files in the hope that they will be future-proofed against events — hard-disk failures or changing computers — that have zapped so much data in the past — including, for me, the whole BBC B and Psion eras.
But is this a silly act of trust in Google? At present, it stores data for an unlimited time and won’t delete unused accounts for nine months (much longer than most rivals). But suppose in 10 years’ time it is bought by a less ethical company or decides to charge £1 000 for past storage? Or something even better arrives and it is impossible to transfer files. But that is then. At the moment, Google has most of the answers. – Guardian Unlimited Â