Thoughts on Google Docs

Tom Taulli asked me for the BloggingStocks interview, what I thought of Software as a Service. Like Google docs. My answer never made it to the article, but I kept thinking about the question.

I have a theory now, a litmus test of online services if you will. Imagine the following scenario:

You have spent 2 weeks preparing a huge presentation for a client. As you leave your office to meet the client, you have two options (you can't choose both, for the sake of argument):
1. You can store the presentation on your laptop and launch it directly from there, or
2. You can store your presentation in google docs, and launch it directly from there.
Which one do you pick?

Today, I cannot imagine anyone picking option 2. What if google docs is down? What if you can't get an internet connection at your clients offices? What if you forget your login? On the other hand, you run the risk of having a hard-disk crash, or having your laptop stolen. Yet, I think I know what choice I would make...

LiveProject 2.0 is out in the wild...

This week we finally release LiveProject 2.0. In that regard, we sent out a press release, and I got interviewed on BloggingStocks.

Release 2.0 was major for us, since we revamped large parts of our UI, fixed numerous bugs, and of course added major features such as the Gantt Chart. Now we'll go back to posting more frequent updates, every few weeks, with some cool features some of our customers have requested.

On the business side, we decided to offer up a free Microsoft project viewer version. The code is the same as the professional version, but users won't need an account, and they can use it as long as they wish. Our purpose is to get LiveProject on as many machines as possible. Once it's there, we hope that at least some customers will realize the great value we also offer with our collaboration features. Those collaboration features are what we sell of course, but a free project viewer is an amazing offer. Steelray and Seavus are our main competitors, and they each charge well for a project viewer.

It shall be exciting to see what the future brings, so far our downloads and response have been great.