more google news?

What is it about Google and the media constantly looking at what they are doing next? As you may be aware (unless you have been living under a rock) Google bought YouTube for $1.65billion in Google Stock last week. Some say its a bargain, some say Google are now going to face huge lawsuits for copyright materials; I think that Google want to take on MySpace. I can see Orkut going through a 'merger' with YouTube soon, to bring a community focus to YouTube.. but then again what do I know?

Been playing with the new Google Groups this week. At work I have volunteered to create and manage our Teams Guidebook. Basically, I want to create a collaborative document that I can create and my colleagues can help keep updated. I found some ideas online, but they all wanted getting paid and I wasn't going to pay for this. Google Groups seemed the best idea, as you can create non-searchable, members only pages and discussions. I started getting it all ready, when a colleague points out that we can't keep commercially sensitive information on there. "Yeah, I know!" I reply, "its just guidelines on how to do your job better." so he comes back with "But our processes are commercially sensitive" ... oh... So I binned that idea, and now we are looking at Microsoft Sharepoint. I hope we don't have to pay for this..

Google have also combined Spreadsheets and Writely into Docs which is obviously taking a hit at Microsoft Office. You know that the BigG went into partnership with Sun Microsystems recently? You didn't? Anyway Sun are the owners of Open Office, and Google have some of there programmers down there improving this free opensource software. Eventually, we are going to have Docs & openOffice working together - on your home PC you can use all the functions of OpenOffice, and as long as you are on an internet connected PC you will be able to work on your docs online.. very clever.

Next year, I forsee the launch of an online storage from Google which you will use to back up photos, docs, etc. I reckon they will give everyone a minimum of 2Gb of storage, link it in with Google Search/Gmail/Calendar/Reader/Picasa/Open Office and there we have a FREE kickass package..

Does that make sense? I hope so.. Maybe I will finally be able to ditch the expensive Microsoft packages, and do everything online!