The Desktop is Dead

So it's been a technology month from, a fictional hot place below the surface of the earth. Thankfully, I had one good idea today that I think solved someone's problem and requires no work on my part.

My off-campus Internet server, that hosts relaxpc.com and webliographer.com as well as a handful of other sites for friends and family (see my sister's jewelry!) has been choking under the weight of spam for some time now. Moving to a new server has been a nightmare. Meanwhile, I volunteered to help a friend move data from an old desktop to her new laptop. Another apparently easy job which was damn near impossible: the machine had no Ethernet card: Windows 98 wouldn't talk to the USB drive I had her buy: another machine wouldn't recognize the hard drive and the CDROM at the same time; her Windows 98 wouldn't recognize the Ethernet card in the new computer. I finally managed to copy the data from the old hard drive to a new one that has drivers for the network card and am copying the files at a blazing 225Kps to a machine that will (presumably) talk to the USB drive.

But that's not why I'm writing. Today, I finally had a good idea, that may actually be of some help to someone.

A couple of my relatives who live a couple thousand miles apart are working on a business together. They contacted me, their Primary Technical Support Person, to see how I could help them figure out a way to "set up a server" so that they could share their files. They were even willing to pay me. There had been talk about Quickbooks. I envisioned some kind of VPN solution, which seemed like a tremendous PITA, as I have tried assiduously not to learn anything more about Windows networking since the former millennium.

Remembering that a techie's job is not to give people what they asked for, but what they need to solve the problem at hand, I asked just what it was they needed to do. It turns out that they were mostly interested in keeping a spreadsheet with their inventory.

"That's it?" I said.

"Pretty much."

"How about Google Spreadsheet?."

It's actually better than both using Excel (or even its Open Source competitor) since both people can edit the same document . AT THE SAME TIME. You can download the file as an .XLS or .CSV file for safe keeping on your own hard drive. (It turns out that apparently one of them already knew about Google Spreadsheets. I still think it's the best solution for the problem as I now understand it.)

I've already opined about Writely. I set up accounts for them for Writely too.

So, forget desktop apps. Who needs Excel or oocalc when you've got Google Spreadsheets? (Num Sum seems to be another option.)