Jeremiah's Music Blog: Google Calendar

Google Calendar - 1st Review

Google's Calendar product (well, its beta) went live earlier this week. I've been using it with steadily increasing frequency over the last couple of days in particular. I've found the interface to be quite easy to grasp, and I was placing events with relative quickness.

One of the trickier parts of the current interface is the collaborative part - the feature that allows you to share your calendar with the public or a select group, and administer whether or not those guests have the ability to add/modify/delete events on your calendar. The FAQ is a little wanting in this regard, but I'm sure that will be remedied in the near future.

Overall, my initial experience with this has been overwhelmingly positive, and I'm tickled that Google's provided a really functional (at least for my current needs) service. I'm sure it will only continue to get better as more people give Google feedback on Calendar.

I recently wrote about Calendar, where I opined one Google's threat to Microsoft's dominance in the "office application" space. With the addition of Calendar, Microsoft's Outlook product is all but replaced, feature/function wise. Next in line is Excel or perhaps Word. I forsee a web-based document editor that outputs to PDF or some similar (and non-proprietary) open-format.

Of course, web services are not appropriate for every company or individual. It's not easy to wean users from comfortable habits, nor is it easy to ask them to change their relationship to information/data/security, etc, which is required when moving to web-based services.

Either way, companies looking to make a cut in operation expenses (and there are a *lot* of those) can now look to Google as an alternative email, contact, calendaring and task management tool.

Or so I think. Usual disclaimers apply.

Posted by Jeremiah at April 20, 2006 06:00 AM | Tag This Post | Digg It!