Wednesday morning, Twitter users flocked to the social media site to complain that Google Apps weren’t working. The problems started with Gmail and Google Drive before spreading to Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Presentations. Google quickly addressed the situation and users were advised to check the Apps Status Dashboard for updates as they investigated the case. We are often inconvenienced by crashing servers or website maintenance, but Google? We take it for granted that giants like Google will be able to run their services smoothly, constantly. When they can’t,…

Some of you may already be familiar with Google Drive since it has been available to try and accessible as an app on Android. However, for the rest of us, we remain curious as to what will happen to our Google Documents once Google Drive takes effect. Of course certain small changes will occur such as documents at the header will show up as “drive” and your created and shared documents will be separated indicating ownerships and updates on the right-hand side with the added feature of avatars. …

The cloud doesn’t scare me. The future will be more secure the sooner bigger companies adopt standards on cloud computing and data storage that makes sense. By that time, we’ll have the infrastructure in place to make the internet accessible from virtually anywhere. The challenge I’ve had over the past few months with Google Docs is the reliability issue. There are very few things in business that are more frustrating than to lose work because of technology. We put in human effort, knowledge, and creativity into doing things. When we lose access to them (or the entire documents themselves) it…

Jeff Bullas had a post up on his blog, Is Twitter About to Terminate Google Buzz, that discussed how Google Buzz is essentially dead. However, I don’t think Twitter killed Google Buzz. I think Google Buzz killed Google Buzz. I had high hopes for it. I really did. I didn’t see it as a Twitter killer or substitution for Twitter, but rather a more social version of the Google Reader Share with Note feature. I thought it might be a nice way to write a few lines about a blog post or news item you stumbled across. And with more blogs disabling comments, I thought it had potential to usher in a new era of blog commenting….

Hey, you know Microsoft Office, that thing you’ve been downloading illegally for free all these years? It would seem that Microsoft’s finally catching up with the current state of computing – in June, they’ll be offering it for free, for real. In a move more than likely inspired by Google Docs’ sudden usefulness to people who want to be able to use one set of tools across the cloud, Microsoft will be releasing a free, ad-supported, online version of Office along side a more robust, un-free version in June. The hope is that, as approximately 90% of Office users are business users, they’ll prefer the…