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Comment by kingsidharth | Hacker News Reader

I don't think author means to claim the world has moved on. Early adopters have, and as the tablet replaces the desk/lap-tops with internet everywhere, Office will be irrelevant.

1. Google Docs.

2. Gmail, Google Docs [Free]

3. Google Docs

4. Google Docs can preview / edit. You just need internet.

I haven't used office in ages. I consider myself a fairly early adopter of technology and yes I've moved on. My mom has not, I don't think she ever will.

It's like mobile phones made wrist watch redundant. But people still wear them for:

1. Luxury.

2. Habit.

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I work in the legal field and they will never, ever use Google Docs for anything. You do not put important documents on another company's computers and you especially don't do that if they are in the U.S. (They ban dropbox for the same reason).

I wonder if they've consider developing a Google Apps appliance, a contained webserver (physical or virtual) with just a simple API to store and load documents, email, etc. You'd load the software from 'the cloud', which would then call the appliance on the LAN to get your stuff.

Seems to satisfy the privacy requirements while keeping the more maintenance heavy components on their machines.

Here's the thing, though.

Tablets won't replace the desktop/laptop. Augment, sure, but they aren't going to kill them off, especially in the workplace. They're different devices with different functions--it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven.

Google Docs is great for consumption, sure, but for creation it's so-so (especially compared with better, dedicated tools), and there's no guarantee it won't be sunsetted when it ceases to help funnel meat into Google's advertising maw.

> it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven

Great analogy. Unless tablets grow in terms of connectable peripherals, I can't imagine secretaries, programmers, accountants, or anybody else spend 8 hours staring down their desk on a 7" screen poking fingers at a virtual keyboard.

Can't all modern Android tablets connect to all modern peripherals? The first one to ever exist (Xoom) can connect to a display, wireless keyboard, and can act as a USB host to connect to arbitrary USB devices. I imagine the most recent tablets are far more advanced in that area already.

Connecting to peripherals is irrelevant in the tablet takeover. In fact, tablets are irrelevant in the tablet takeover. What's going to happen is that the tablet OS and app ecosystem will reign while the form factor becomes whatever is convenient for the task at hand.

Media consumption? Tablet. Work? Unknown form factor, but with correct input/output attached and running the same software as the media tablet.

"Can't all modern Android tablets connect to all modern peripherals? The first one to ever exist (Xoom) can connect to a display, wireless keyboard, and can act as a USB host to connect to arbitrary USB devices. I imagine the most recent tablets are far more advanced in that area already."

Things is, what platform is going to be the best at switching modes between desktop and tablet, with full support for multiple monitors, printing, VPN etc, stuff business will like? Windows 8.

I'm not going to lie--if I could get a job where I flopped out on beanbags and did all my work on a tablet, that'd be pretty nifty. I just don't see using a tablet for content creation and having to sit at a normal desk.

Good point. Perhaps the problem is the work station and not the device itself. Still, the way tablets work now, they have to be at a fairly low angle, or one's hands will quickly get tired. That coupled with lack of real world applications doesn't seem to align very well with tablet's possible ubiquitous future.

Maybe it's better the way it is. Maybe having a machine for "work" and machine for "play" is how we keep things intuitive, modular, and clean.

Google Office suite will not be replacing Microsoft Office in the business world for a long time, until Google figures out how to make GOffice properly format and consistently display their documents. I write a lot of sheet music and guitar tablature in GDocs (so I can get to it on a tablet when I get the call that a friend's guitarist didn't show up), and it seems every few months there is an update that breaks the formatting completely.

Granted, writing music in GDocs isn't a common use case, but advanced formatting is the way of business. If Google can't get it right, they can't get business right.

Current Google Docs functionality comparable with WordPad, like it or not. Same for Live office suite, Zoho, etc. They are just unusable for complex documents containing multiple columns, continuous sections, multilevel lists, multiple page layouts in a document, etc, etc, etc. The basic stuff such as saving character, paragraph and table styles is not there yet.

I can't use Google Docs without thinking how much worse it is than Word 2003 was.

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