The Google Experiment: Day Four

I’m almost embarrassed to mention that the Google One Today Fund won’t be receiving a donation today and it’s not because I spent most of my day in meetings. On the contrary, today was a quiet day which gave me a lot of time to catch up on outstanding emails, requests and other activities.

The one thing I did today, and which I should have done right at the beginning of this week, was to remove all shortcuts on my desktop to my familiar local applications and replace them with Chrome and Drive, which are my only remaining shortcuts. It makes choosing the cloud solution more obvious and automatic.

The other thing I noticed is that Google looked very good at MS Office when designing Apps. They did not try to redesign eg Docs as a cloud solution with special ‘cloud-only’ features, which is what you often see with HR cloud solutions. The menus are very similar, buttons look the same and menu options are where you expect them to be. On the one hand that means a missed opportunity but on the positive side it also means a less steep learning curve, which increases adoption rates.

What I am still getting used to is that you cannot right click on a file in Drive and open it in the corresponding App. If you click on a file, you’ll automatically end up in View mode, and to edit a file you need to click again. Could be this is a ‘hidden’ feature that I’ve yet to discover… If you know the answer, let me know in the comments!