For many years I was a slave of both Microsoft and my own PC. Without Microsoft I could not compute, nor could I without my own PC. In the last 3 months I have decided to cut my bond with both, Microsoft and my own PC and so far things are working. But until today at Google Zeitgeist Europe I had not had a chance to test how well they were working. The opportunity arose because The Grove where the conference takes place is big hotel and my room is kind of far so when I left the conference center and I wanted to do some work I had a choice, go to my room and back, around 5 minutes, or stay at the conference where they have PCs and listen to Chad Hurley present Youtube. In short the choice was working on a PC that was not mine or go to my room and miss Chad. So since I am a fan of Chad (in spite of Youtube not being yet in Spanish), I decided to stay, listen to Chad and while I was doing that program one of the Lenovos that Google has for participants. So here’s the good news, that Lenovo was mine in less than 5 minutes. How? Foxmarks with all my bookmarks and username and passwords, cookies, was installed in 3 minutes. With this I could write this post for example. And then Gspace that has all my spreadsheets, docs, spreadsheets, family pictures, favorite songs, videos, was installed in 2 minutes so I had access to all my stuff. And Gmail of course was up there in an instant giving me my Fon email and the Gmail archives of my mail and google talk which is now integrated in Gmail. And that’s all I needed, in 5 minutes I had made the Lenovo mine. If I hadn’t been multitasking I could probably had done it in 3 minutes. And I remember the time when a new Windows PC would take 5 hours to configure. Chad was great btw, he showed a video of an octogenarian who is (yes) a star on Youtube.
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Henrik Ahlen on May 22, 2007 ·
Martin, you have described very well in this little story why internet-based apps and environments are the future, and not bloated local apps like Microsoft Office.
I too enjoy the freedom of all these apps and I also use Google Docs a lot for organizing team work
The key to making people switch to this kind of services is to explain to them how it works and how they can benefit. This is not so easy, and most software developers don’t know how to evangelize. Scenarios like this are inspiring!
Antoin O Lachtnain on May 22, 2007 ·
Have you tried putting ubuntu or zubuntu on a bootable usb drive? Maybe this is the future? You bring your own preconfigured operating system with you. Works better for people who don’t have instant, high-speed broadband availability (80 percent of the computers in the world I guess).
Martin Varsavsky on May 22, 2007 ·
Will try that Antoin!
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anonymous on May 22, 2007 ·
You should try the oqo… http://www.oqo.com