14 DAY TRIAL // Shocking, you might say, but indeed, it is the truth. 73 percent of the Americans interviewed admitted to never having heard about Google Docs. Well, to be honest, the application only has about 500 thousand users in total, according to compete.com, but that is frequent users with emphasis on frequent. Many have just clicked the "Open as Google Document" option for viewing attachments and have left it at that. Still, they count as people who have used the office application from the Mountain View based company.
Supposedly, an alternative for desktop office applications, Google Docs have failed miserably at that with only nought point five percent of the total number giving up desktop and switching to Internet based applications. 94 percent have never even tried a web based productivity suite.
To be totally honest, the survey was only conducted on 600 PC users and many might argue that it wasn?t a statistically valid survey of computer users. Nevertheless, the actual fact is that this hones on the central limit theorem that Abraham de Moivre first discovered and was later resurrected by the famous French Mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace.
Duncan Riley, of TechCrunch.com, thinks that "The challenge is to overcome over 25+ years of what people consider to be normal (desktop apps) by proving that the online alternative is ready and capable of being used. There?s little doubt today, at least based on OS X and Linux adoption figures that there is a very real and definite move away from Microsoft."
I?m not a frequent user of Google Docs myself, I mean I never use it at all. I just tried it once and, while I was waiting for the document to be converted, I asked others what they had thought about it. The answer was sort of a moan and it's meaning was that of "eh?" nothing more, nothing less. It?s clear that Google still has ways to go until it will provide the online alternative for desktop office applications and when that happens I?ll probably embrace it. Not right now, it?d be like a step back, the way I see it.