Are we too reliant on Google and Microsoft? When social networking, I’m aware that I rely heavily on Google Reader, Gmail and Google Search and on Microsoft Word for drafting articles. But should we be happy to leave all of our data “in the cloud” with Google? Google relies upon you using their services as much as possible so that they can refine the advertising that appears on the right side of your browser. There are conspiracy theorists who will tell you that they use the information for a lot more insidious purposes.
Whether there is truth in that view or not I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable about putting all of my eggs in just these two baskets and have been looking at alternatives. Whilst change for change sake is silly, it’s sensible to at least look and see what’s available.
The problem is, services like Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader and applications such as Microsoft Office are perceived to be best of breed and in many cases, have become the default of choice. In addition, many people use Internet Explorer and, whether we like it or not, there are still websites that only work with Internet Explorer.
Criteria
The challenge is to find alternatives that work as well as their Google or Microsoft counterparts, are free of advertising, are free to use and, preferably, are based upon open source platforms.
Problem.
And there’s the problem – in some areas, such as search engines, whilst there are a number of alternatives, none of them is as good or as easy to use as Google. The possible exception is Scroogle (www.scroogle.org) which is a bit of a cheat as it sits between the end user and Google, making sure no cookies are on your machine and deleting all adverts. It’s ugly to look at but is fast, and advert free. The same problem arises for readers – Google Reader is just so far ahead of anything else I can find.
Webmail
I long ago gave up on Yahoo mail for most things and use Gmail and again, it’s tough to find something that meets the criteria above. Someone posted me a link to Fastmail. Although it looks promising, I haven’t given it a thorough test drive yet.
Browsers
This is a little easier. For a long time I’ve given up on Internet Explorer and have been using Firefox. However, Firefox is beginning to become bloated and seems to lock up a lot with Windows 7. Chrome is OK on Windows but falls over on my Mac and is a Google product. In fact, I have yet to find a decent browser for the Mac; Firefox comes closest but it still has problems. And the built in Browser, Safari, is IMHO, the one thing about the Mac OS that Apple should feel ashamed of!
I’m going to investigate Chromium which meets the criteria although again, it feels like cheating as it is a Chrome clone!
Office
OpenOffice.org is the best alternative to MS Office. The Open Office suite is great value for money – it’s free! It features the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentations program, Base database program, Math equation editor, and Draw graphics program. And it reads all MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. (I’ve never bought Access, the MS database, so can’t say if it reads those files too). Although it lacks a few of the top end features in the MS Office suite, it’s solid, reliable and, for a free suite, very impressive. It’s already become my suite of choice on the Mac and I use it and MS Office on the PC.
Conclusion
It is possible to use a computer and avoid Google and Microsoft but at the moment, the former in particular are so far ahead of anything else that changing to other applications often means compromising on quality. What have you found that might just be a suitable alternative to Google’s and Micosoft’s products?
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