In case you’re wondering, there’s a reason google apps isn’t a big revenue generator, and it’s not (entirely) because they’ve just recently hired a sales team. It’s not (entirely) because the sales team does a bad of converting sales. And it’s certainly not because they’re afraid of backlash by hiding/reducing free google apps services. No, It’s because the bloody thing is buggy. Who’s going to pay for a service that reformats your display every time you save a page.
I’ve got 2 Google Gadgets on the www.amateurandroid.com homepage. I had to put both of them in a table in order to get any kind of resonable control over the display positioning. Even though each Gadget is center aligned, each time I save, and go back to edit they pop over to the left again. I have to click align left then align center each time – useless.
Nevermind that I had to create my own custom Google Gadgets just to display a feedburner feed (for this blog) and an AmateurAndroid twitter feed to a page. Not that it was hard, but you can hardly expect users to be proficient with XML, JavaScript and various JavaScript APIs. I doubt most developers I know would even know where to start developing Google Gadgets.
Even so, each time I turn around the scroll bars on the feeds disappear. Simple, small, but extremely irritating bugs. That’s why when it’s time to spend money, I’ll buy a contract with a hosting provider and build it myself. There just isn’t enough there to build even a semi-credible web presence.
Instead of flaky WYSIWYG editors that are too smart for their own good – and browser support nightmares, give us standard Wiki syntax. It’s becoming the defacto standard as more and more people are familiarizing themselves with [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax | wiki link syntax ]]. Or if you like the WYSIWYG editors, simplify it and make it work properly like the nice wordpress editor I’m using to write this post.
I imagine that Google apps is good as a project management tool, especially for teams with geolocation challenges. The Security role management, integration with GMail (with your own @domain.com url) and easy addition of Google Analytics make it simple to manage and track what is going on.
KevDev
