I guess that Tom is right – we do got off topic

I’ll look up documentation on my desktop sometimes from MSDN, 4GuysFromRolla, or whoever and do the actual coding on my laptop. The desktop resolution is enormous so it’s pretty easy to just glance over real quick at a screencast or something. However, a lot of the times I have to copy and paste code samples when I’m working with 3rd party components so in those instances its more convenient to have the documentation on the same machine as the one I’m coding on.

To me it boils down to two things. One, documentation is a vital part of programming and I love to be able to just look over and have it there. Two, I love having the ability to keep the old version of a site open as I code the newer version so I can see what I’m changing side by side with what used to be there.

Wow…I just realized this comment is completely off topic in regards to the actual post

My resolution is a wide-screen one; it’s 1280*800, on my laptop anyway. My desktop monitor is enormous; it’s got something like a 24″ diagonal. I prefer to write code on the laptop simply because my Desktop has Windows XP Home edition and can’t do a lot of the .NET stuff, plus the way it’s situation on my desk is a bit awkward for programming. It works great for playing video games though!

As for your work style – don’t you prefer to write code on a bigger monitor?
What resolution your laptop monitor supports?

I understand that issue with having two computers; keeping them in sync can be a problem. I typically do all of my work on my laptop computer and have all of my leisure stuff on my desktop (my music collection, video games, etc…) Having a docking station is a must for your situation though. What model do you use currently?

I didn’t want to compare all of them, just Google Docs. OpenOffice might be a cool alternative though… Is StarOffice still around? And as far as the docking stations go, I don’t really use one anyways just because I’m up and off so much at college. I carry the laptop on me virtually at all times. When I’m sitting at my desk in my apartment though I have a big desktop with a GIANT LCD monitor that I use for a lot of casual browsing while I do gaming or coding on this laptop.

@Tom,

Yeah, I can understand Google Docs increasing productivity as a result of the lack of distractions compared to Office, but a lot of college professors and students (especially engineers) are heavy power users. Even my English professor is a total stud when it comes to using the Word editing/marking features, which in my opinion is a more powerful form of collaboration than what Google Docs currently provides.

As far as your blog goes, I understand that concern too. I originally bought the domain name AJAXNINJA.COM because I had anticipated that I would be writing a lot of .NET and AJAX code. I still showcase my Facebook.NET code every chance I get but really I’ve just grown more fond of talking about trends in the tech industry and doing some marketing analysis. In fact, I bought the domain name MARKETING-NINJA.COM and I will probably start rebranding this blog using that domain name, just so that way people aren’t surprised when they don’t see much AJAX on a blog called AjaxNinja. My current content and style won’t change though, plus I’m going to keep the AjaxNinja domain name since I get a fair amount of traffic going down it.

Oh, and thanks for the subscribe, but don’t expect much The thing that has been most shocking to me is how hard it is to actually publish what you intended to. For instance, I really expected to have more code-based posts from the get go but I’ve found that I have to put myself on a schedule to make that happen. Anyway, it is not yet what I hope it will be.

@Arik – Thanks for the suggestion, we did look at OpenOffice and found that it didn’t offer enough of an advantage to switch. If I’m going to put people on a Linux box its going to be one where the experience is entirely browser based. If the end result of doing this is adding Linux to the products I have to support users on than it won’t be worth it.

Forgot about Windows Workspaces… On both of my older Windows machines I used Office 2003 so I never got to play around with any of the Live! stuff. I’m going to get the academic version of Office 2007 so I’ll get to put my meathooks on that feature soon!

@kalivd,

I did not know about those services; very cool! How do all of those compare to MS Office though?

@richardatDELL,

My XPS M1330 is like owning a brand new Camero; I get compliments on how cool it looks on a pretty regular basis. One time my professor stopped midsentence during a lecture, came over to my chair, looked at the laptop for about 30 seconds and went “niiiiiiiice.” In addition I can’t imagine living without Windows ultimate now that I’ve used it for a couple of months; being able to use the Dell TV tuner to record my favorite TV shows while I’m off doing work is pretty cool. unfortunately I filled up my entire 120g hard drive within four days of recording TV shows; I guess I need to find a good external hard drive!

I think we´re going to se more services around office, and storing in the “cloud”.

I realy like office workspaces, and it would be interesting to se someone compare office live with google docs.

peace

You raise an excellent point in regards to trimming costs for departments that don’t need the full functionality of Ms Office. In addition the notion of Google owning whatever documents you place on Google Docs is another concern that I overlooked. The point of my post was mainly speaking from my experience as a student (I only big limitation that Google Docs imposes on my professional work is the file size; I can’t read any big powerpoints or Word docs) trying to rely exclusively on Google Docs.

In addition, I’m not going to put anything on Google’s servers that I don’t want them to read, such as any financial data. Great comment overall, Tom.

P.S. Subscribed to your blog.

I run an IT department that maintains a little over 200 computers at this point. Using those computers are different levels of employees. Administrative positions need Microsoft Office, there’s just no doubt. I’m not going to put a finance person on Google Docs. But many of the positions that actually do the functional stuff only use the computer for basic word processing and never print out their work (they e-mail it). For them something like Google Docs is ideal.

So taking that into account consider this. We spend about $800 per PC when all is said and done and a lot of that is on software. I’ve been moving all our custom software to ASP.NET for several years now to the point that we’re about 90% there. So if we could find a Web Based alternative for Office we could move all of those people to cheaper Linux PCs that last longer (because they require far less horsepower than a Windows PC running Office 2003) and cost about $300

If we could use Google Docs on just the light office users I think it would save us about $173,000 every 5 years. That’s pretty darn significant and we’re just a small-to-midsize business. Corporations could easily save millions.

Unfortunately that great plan is thwarted until there’s a local version of Google Docs (think the Google Search boxes). I won’t have our corporate data on a Google server given the terms Google Docs give. (and yes, for the record I’ve thought of Zoho but with Google Docs breathing down their necks the way they are I just don’t have enough faith in the company’s survival to plan my strategy around them)