Dog-Fooding

I was reading an article about Visual Studio 2010, next generation Microsoft developement toolset. What cought my eye was not the features. It was dog-fooding practice so wide spread in Microsoft. Dog-fooding or “eating your own dog-food”, is the practice of a company using its own products internally. Microsoft employees browsing internet on IE is doog fooding. It is trivial now that IE is a market leader, but it was true when IE was in its infancy and Netscape Navigator ruled the web.

It touched the nerve with me. I am dog-fooding. I use gganttic, my project mangement software, every day for my own projects.
Since gGanttic is based on Google office applications I made decision to use Google Documents and spreadsheets for everything. So I am eating Google’s dog-food full time.

What is obvious to me that Google Document developers are not dog-fooding.
I am dead sure the specificaiton of the next version of Google Documents is not written in Google Documents. The sheer amount of problems I face when writing a lengthy document with a number of images shows me that I am probably in a tiny nimority of Google serious users. And that Google developers are not in this minority, at least not many of them. For which I am sorry.

For their own sake, as for their users, they should start working with those applications for real.

Economic Crisys and Google Office

Economic crisys is upon us. All of us. Wherever we are. In the intangled world of today noone is exampt from feeling it. To cope one has to cut spending to what is necessary. This much is trivial.

I predict that in that environment more people then usual will want to try Google Docs which I like to call Google Office. Google got gMail and Calendar, Documents (word editor), Spreadsheets, and Presentation. They all are web 2.0 applications, which I call HTML/CSS/Javascript applications doing enough on client and use Ajax well enough to create good responsiveness.

So far I did not see users giving up on their Microsoft Office or even Open Office and marching on to Google Office.

I am working on a Google Docs integrated Project like appliction to fill the void Google left in that area. Our team made decision to use Google Docs exclusively. It was and still is a right decision. Because now I know first hands the good the bad and the ugly sides of them.

I belive that in down economy one should try it. It is free. I encourage you to do so. It allows collaboration, which is important when travel budgets are slashed.
On the same breath, I want to manage your expectations a bit. You might discover it is too early for you.

(Added on 2008-11-15, I just found the fresh Business Week article saying the same thing:

CHEAP TECH FOR HARD TIMES
By Steve Hamm

As the U.S. enters what appears likely to be a painful recession, a major shift is taking place in how businesses assess technology products. They’re under terrific pressure to cut costs. According to a newly revised forecast from market researcher IDC, growth in U.S. tech spending will decline to 0.9% in 2009, down from a previous forecast of 4.9% growth. But rather than just slice budgets across the board, many companies are switching to a handful of new technologies that save them money. These technologies existed during the last recession, but they were immature. Now they’re established, and the downturn seems likely to hasten their adoption. Chief among them are software delivered over the Internet, known as cloud computing, such as Google Apps…)

Google Office – the Good The Bad and The Ugly.

The good – it is online. It runs on every major browser and every OS. It passes the minimal requirements test in terms of usability and features. It is free. It is highly collaborative. It is, to a degree, integrated. It is constantly evolving and improving. It is versioned (Docs, Spreadsheets) meaning you can get back to old versions. It got API, meaning 3rd party applications can be added to make use of the core set and complement the missing features.

The bad – some applications are more mature then others. gMail, Calendar and Spreadsheets are better then the rest (In My Humble Opinion). Ajax, the technology Google use limits what is easy or even possible to do. No use of Flash or Silverlight makes it run on every browser with nothing else installed, but limits in many ways.

The ugly – sometimes the limitations of Ajax make you cry. Many bugs. Long documents are very hard to edit in Documents. For some reason Documents renamed my internal bookmarks. It all means that Google Office is for early adopters, not mainstream and not for enterprise where reliability is crucial.

I am prepared to live with bad and the ugly. I am set to improve it where I can (see www.gganttic.com). That is because it evolves. I see improvements all the time. Being early adopter I am more tolerant to rough edges, hoping to win by being first to ride the paradigm shift.

Wheter Google Office is right for you I can not say. And you can not say either, unless you try. Do it.

Good .NET hosting – DiscountASP.net

It is hard to find a good hosting service for your .NET application. I have had serveral, and kept looking until I found the one which I want to recommend.
It is DiscountASP.net (sometimes abbreviated as DASP by the community)

I used it for my personal domain, for couple of clients and now for my new startup. All is shared hosted.
I like the price, and because of it can live without phone support. I would rather them lower prices further then provide phone support, really.

I have opend couple of tickets over time, and was generally satisfied. Was long ago, so sorry I don’t recall specifics. I use FTP all the time and it is fast enough. I do stuff in control panel, define web applications etc, and it is responsive and logicaly organized.
One thing that I value is quick adaptation of new Microsoft technologies. I am on the bleading edge and need the latest stuff.
Another strength is site layout. I tried one even cheaper hosting at a company where I regsitered my domain and was very disappointed by their web site organization. I could hardly find the way to control panel, through pile of advertising and different other services. DASP focuses on hosting and is modest in their attempts to cross and up sell.

There were several small outages that I recall. With Amazon down twice this year what you can expect? Nobody is 99.999, i am convinced. DASP was IMHO well within the reasonably dependent service definition. Suffice to say my application breaks so much more then the hoster, that it will take me time when DASP becomes the reliability bottleneck.

Google Documents allow CSS editing

I have noticed that recently, Google Documents allow CSS editing.
It was there for a while, I simply did not do much of Google Document writing lately.
Now I am back into it. I am writing a long Tutorial document. This Tutorial ought to look well. Hence my interest in the subject.

People reaction to it, from the comment I have seen, range from positive – it allows customization of the look – to negative. The negative is interesting. Commenters point out that CSS is too technical for a general purpose Word processor. They claim GD is on the path to becoming an HTML editor. This rubs many technical readers the wrong way – to them nothing is wrong with HTML.

I personally adore CSS and what it allows me to do. One thing, before I start tweaking my TUtorial CSS, I’ll go out Googling for CSS libraries for Google Documents. I am sure someone did some good work already that I can benefit from.

There is, however, a point in the “too technical” argument.

Microsoft Word allows control over styles, but only via a hierarchy of dialogs. I would agree that CSS can be intimidating for newbies. That is why Dreamweaver, and it hard to get more professional in HTML then that, have dialogs to create/edit styles.

I assume there is somebody at google who monitors user reaction to new features.
If those who claim GD is “too technical” are the majority, then at some point we’ll see Style Dialog coming to fore, and CSS hidden somewhere.

Still being able to customize styles, one way or another, is, IMHO, a huge step forward.