Google has just announced that it will offer a Premer edition of its free office apps (like Google docs) to businesses. In terms of our academic discussions, especially as they pertain to "Professional Writing Technologies," I'm trying to get my head around what that'll mean for the changing face of writing.
So, for $50 per license - that is, "per user" - per year, a company can have access to "Premier" editions of those free, web-based Google apps. Comparing that to the ball-park prices of Office Professional for $440 or even Small Business fro around $300 per user, Google definitely seems to offer a cost-effective solution. Or is it?
To whit (ka-boom), on the face of it (and by that I mean that I haven't fully delved into what the disticntions between Google's Premier and Free are), they seem like very, very similar offerings. That's kind of too bad for Google since they've just launched a big ad campaign promoting these business apps.
However, it's not really bad news for everyone else since the base versions of those apps are already free. And of course it's the ad campaign isn't acutally that bad for Google since it won't cost them that much and they've got more money than they know what to do with. As with everything else Google, the programs are web-based, but evidently there's a free Google plug-in called Gears that'll allow some data to be stored locally.
At the very least, since Google is really good about syncing up their applications (Gmail to YouTube to this very blog!), and now even Google Chrome, could this be just the thing to compete with Microsoft Office's (and/or Works which you can save to older versions of Office) ubiquity (spelled "monopoly")?
