Thursday, April 4, 2013

The Future of Productivity

In TechCrunch this morning there was an interesting post on a Gartner survey. The report; “Gartner: Tablet Shipments To Grow 69.8% YoY To 197M Units in 2013, As PCs/Laptops Decline 7.3% To 315M Units”. shows where we are headed (per Gartner). I do believe that after the last year this is the trend and the numbers could be right on.

Another opinion (or review) at Computerworld with “2.4B computing devices to ship this year, Gartner says”.

What does this mean for software and app’s developers? Growth, growth, growth! Developers you can make money. These tables and smartphones of today have a long way to go to be a highly productive, graphic for blogpersonal devices. We can do some things like read email and documents, send text messages, and perhaps catch up on the news, even watch a movie, however serious development of documents or editing is not at our fingertips. Creating new documents, editing spreadsheets, or updating websites (I did not say create websites), are out of reach at the present time.

I use both Android and Apple devices and the closest thing to a productive piece of office software is Pages and or Numbers on iOS. Although good neither are that powerful and I have to retreat to my laptop.  Google Docs is nice but limited to a power user and a good number of road warriors are Power Users! I used Google Docs for note taking however with Evernote I do not go to Google Docs as much.

Apps like Evernote are highly productive but I still want to create documents and edit sophisticated spreadsheets.

I happen to be a power Microsoft Word user and this is one tool that is not reproduced (or replicated) anywhere on any of the major tablet or smartphone devices. Windows phone, or the Surface may be able to access Microsoft Online but if you read the survey mentioned above (in the first paragraph) you will find that these devices are not leading the list. In any care Surface Pro is out of my league cost wise, might as well buy a laptop computer. Just so you know; I am using Windows 8 and love it, just not on a Surface device.

Note: This morning, on my laptop, I went to Skydrive online and tried to create a Word document to re-experience the online connection. I quit after 10 minutes. The website lost connection, I could not upload an image to the document, lost connection again. I quit. This also happens when uploading documents to Skydrive. This is not being productive either. My wireless connection was good as I was able to access and use other services.

Someone somewhere will build a competitor to Microsoft Office in an App form and the rest will be history. I am waiting.

Just sayin’……..

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