I'm sure a lot of buinesses (small or large) find the idea of hosting their documents (often containing business secrets or of critical importance) on the servers of another entity very, very frightening.

Zoho's online tools are, imho, better than Google's and their Remote API solves a lot of the storage problem(http://writer.zoho.com/public/help/zohoapi/fullpage#RemoteAP...) . I suppose there's still a transactional security issue but with more and more people working at home I think that's an issue no matter what.

I think this is a critical flaw, in this day of HIPAA and SarbOx. Any business that allows someone else to store their data (or even process it) risks personal responsibility for their officers -- and what corporate CTO is going to risk that?

I don't buy this. I'm not an expert on S.O. but I'm close to one in regards to HIPAA. As far as HIPAA is concerned as long as you have a Business Associate Agreement that clearly spells out the privacy level expected from the other party you aren't going to get in trouble for a HIPAA violation.

A Business Associate Agreement nothing to address the SOX requirements, which apply to more companies. "Google ate our documents" is not a defense to SOX filing and reporting requirements.

And yet are happy to type them on an OS that is connected to the internet but that they don't have the source code to

Not just operate well enough, but operate better. All their work in one place, up on the web. Easy team-working. Easy sharing with the customer.

Docs still has ties to paper, though. The Google product that fits this model the best is Wave.

Just had a look at Google Docs and it's not immediately clear to me how it manages references (e.g. "see figure x", "section s", "page n") where it keeps track of all the numbering for you as you insert new figures etc. Word has done this forever. It's a pretty key feature for anyone working on non-trivial documents.

Surely the modern equivalent is the hyperlink?

"Click here" all over the place is very much not the same as "see figure X".

Hyperlinking "click here" is terrible form. Just work the link into a sentence by putting it over a descriptive phrase like "our revenue last quarter", or even (more explicitly) "the graph of our revenue last quarter".

And that works when you print it how?

(If you're thinking "it doesn't matter" then you've not understood why Google Docs isn't ready for the typical business)

I've seen print transformations of hyperlinks that replace them with numbered footnotes. A sufficiently clever one could use its own pagination and put in "[1] see section X page Y". But honestly that's an obsolete format. If your business can't cope without, use Word. But it ought to be able to. What use is paper nowadays? Who prints stuff out?

What people "ought" to do and what they do do are often very different, and you can either pretend that isn't true or you can try to understand it and act accordingly.

I asked "who uses it", because I can't offhand think of anyone who has to. OK, there are the bosses who can't cope with anything invented since the 1980s and are too high placed to be told to suck it up. There are people in countries too backward to expect a reliable internet connection. And perhaps, some documents required by law? I don't know.

"Who uses it" is the question Google should be asking themselves - so they can turn their considerable market and political power towards obsoleting those uses.

Google Apps as distinct apps are dead men walking.

Their only future is as a collection of gadgets and robots for WAVE. WAVE simultaneously solves the problems of over-bloated office suites and Google Apps problem of not having a locally-hosted option.