Bing

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Aristotle
I would love to see open source alternatives to Office succeed, but that's still pretty tepid. And that is the area where MSFT is most vulnerable.

This is actually the area that Google's hitting them hardest in, of the ones you mentioned. It's been suggested that Chrome, rather than being an attack on IE, is an attempt to make Google Docs feel more comfortable - if you keep using IE for your browsing, but use Chrome + Docs/Spreadsheets for cloud-hosted Office, for instance. And the way MS Office is going (and Open Office is following), the performance gap between MS Word and Google Docs is going to be pretty slim (assuming you have a decent internet connection).

[Aristotle]

Google docs is very cool for sharing documents, but for just working on my own documents I hate it.

The idea of information I might need immediately, regardless of my internet status, being only available over the internet, is not a comfortable one.

[leira]

I agree with you on Google Docs. For the most part, I'm an Open Office user. Microsoft Office is installed on a couple of the machines at work, so I wind up using it once in a while. I fucking hate the "ribbon". Why did they have to change the UI so damned much? Just give me a damned menu. Google Chrome bothers me for similar reasons.

[Ilusan]

Originally posted by Aristotle
Google docs is very cool for sharing documents, but for just working on my own documents I hate it.

The idea of information I might need immediately, regardless of my internet status, being only available over the internet, is not a comfortable one.

I couldn't agree more. I keep hoping google will beef up google docs and even offer some form of an offline editor as well.

You said in an earlier post that microsoft live (grouped in with some others) is crap. I agree, but there's one application for Live that I use religiously-Live Sync. I can write anything on any computer I have synced with their website and have it immediately update on my pc back home. Its a great utility to keep your files organized between computers without any headache. There may be other versions of similar web-based programs that do the same thing...i don't know.

Back on topic...I use Bing for searching restaurants now instead of google. That's about it.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Ilusan
I couldn't agree more. I keep hoping google will beef up google docs and even offer some form of an offline editor as well.

I don't know about Docs, but they definitely have offline facilities for mail. It'll queue everything until you're next online. If they don't yet have it for docs, ask!

[Kerrin]

I think Google Docs or any other such service is fine for non-business-critical documents (e.g. certain types of personal documents, but not others).

Also, I like being in control of and responsible for my own data, so there's no way if I used a service like Google Docs that I'd have the *only* copy of any document on their service. The same applies when considering having offline anytime access to my data.

[Aristotle]

Originally posted by Ilusan
Its a great utility to keep your files organized between computers without any headache. There may be other versions of similar web-based programs that do the same thing...i don't know.

That's pretty neat, but I think I'd honestly just prefer a thumb drive for that. If the data is important enough, I really don't want it making a pass through the Live servers.

[Aristotle]

Wow!

Bing Now Bigger Than Digg, Twitter and CNN

[Leveth]

Actually, decided to try and use Bing for all my searches for a week, side by side with Google. For what I've used it for, Bing has actually been more useful. ~shrug~
I actually like the damn thing. Go figure.