Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Essential Stitching of Apps in the Cloud



I have been thinking quite a bit in the last few years about how much functionality is available in the cloud - that is, the web. I have had several conversations with my buddies over in Redmond about it they are keeping a track on what is being stitched together for free on Google and in other domains. Their answer was often "it can't compete", but I am being more and more convinced that the functionality is there - and it can compete. Indeed, I think that these basic apps, that are being interconnected (and free!) are a game changer. Google docs has an amazing wealth of functionality for the average business person and smaller group or company.

That being said, strategic business people also need offline capabilities too. We need the ability to modify and add to documents (spreadsheets, word processing docs) while in a coffee shop, on the airplane, etc. But this needs to be synched to our documents in the sky as well - automatically and without intervention. For that, I ran across a neat little utility called Syncplicity. I am going to give it a spin and see how it works.