File Management
One thing that is often compared is Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs. However, what is most often compared is the functionality, which is of course where Office clearly is superior. However, less often mentioned is how superior Google Docs is for maintaining and sharing files, which is where Google Docs has the advantage. After long term testing, we have found that the documents we keep on a server, be it Google Docs or Box.net, are more durable than those that we have locally. That is servers – or other people – seem to do a better job of making sure disks keep operating, and in not losing files than we do. Secondly, Google Docs allows for one file to belong to multiple folders, where as Office, and documents in general on Mac OS X and Windows are stuck in a hierarchical model of file management. In truth hierarchical models don’t really reflect reality. For instance a Mockingbird is both part of the birds family, and also the subject of several books. Therefore it could belong to both a file or category on birds and a file or category on books (among many other files and categories). Books are not a subfile of birds and birds are not a subfile of books. Using a hierarchical file management system (much like the tree structure for categorizing life) one has to twist oneself into a pretzel because the organizational design is not reflective of reality.
Example
In this example one can see that we have created three folders, and that one of our documents is part of both folders. If a folder is deleted in Google Docs it does not destroy the underling documents, it just becomes folder-less. For these reasons and more Google Docs offers a superior way of organizing files.
File Management on Google Docs and Box.net
In an early post we described how Box.net provides better file management and organization as well as finding than any Mac or PC file manager we have ever used. Then we find that Google Docs does it better with regards to file management than MS Office. The question we are beginning to ask ourselves is why it is so much easier managing data on server file managers than local computers running Windows or Mac? Why is this?
