Questions for Google’s Jonathan Rochelle

I am interviewing Jonathan tomorrow about all things Google Docs. This will be similar to my interview of Microsoft's Jeff Teper on SharePoint/Office. Any suggested questions much appreciated.

Please post suggested questions below as a comment.

Comments

[André H Banen (a.k.a. ahab)]

Ask Jonathan how big the backlog is for existing bugs and for finishing the often half-baked new features.

There is no bug tracker for Google Docs so (advanced) users can't know which bugs are known or unknown and if there is any update concerning them.

Trix - E.g. in Google Docs spreadsheets there are long standing issues like the fact that some calculations return a raw floating point answer that is totally confusing to non-programmer users (in other spreadsheets this is solved by having two modes, one in which displayed calculation results are used for further computations, the other which uses the raw result; the former is the only one available in GDocs spreadsheets). A typical example of a half-baked feature is Data Validation which works reasonably well for numbers but fails for anything else - especially text.

Writely/Kix - One of the problems with the text editor are the continuous problems with importing/exporting which are far from prefect when one is a Word user. But also the fact that even in the new 'Preview' version there is no real page-by-page WYSIWYG layout. Or the fact that Find and replace won't work on selections - which is a very old problem. A typical half-baked features is the Equation editor - very nice, because it allowed user to enter MimeTeX (La)TeX but also very limited because only relatively short expressions could be entered. The new Equation Editor is hardly better - the interface is counter-intuitive and requires the user to constantly combine the keyboard with mouse-clicks.

Preso - A presentation editor without transitions, without sound, and in which only YouTube videos can be inserted (the latter which is worthless when you are a company using Google Apps with the private Google Video option - you can't create in-company presentations with your videos). In all not a presentation editor that is a selling point.

Sketchy - The drawing editor is still in its infancy - growing up fast but still not import/export compatible with e.g. Visio - which many users do expect. This application shows Google Docs is fleeing forward to HTML5 as you can't run it in Internet Explorer unless you use Chrome Frame - which is an excellent solution - but only if you can convince your company to install it.

GAS - The Google Apps Script engine is a promise that still has to come true. It's JavaScript based and promises to tie many of Google's API with Google Docs spreadsheets - however, unfortunate is that it does not tie the separate parts of Google Docs together - and guess how many people have asked for a real old-fashioned 'mail merge' option to combine spreadsheet data with documents?

Sharing - What makes Google Docs so interesting are its sharing capabilities - but did you realize it allows you to change ownership of your documents (i.e. all file type stored in Google Docs) to non-existing users - just use (and a typo is easily made)a non-existing e-mail address. For Google Apps users there is something worse - when employees leave the company and throws away the files in their Google Apps sub-account no admin can retrieve them and this way many companies have lost vital documents - and their faith in Google Docs.

Help - Last but not least there are two important issues that show where Google Docs is failing - documentation - the help is shallow and contains neither tutorials for beginners no in-depth info for the experienced user; and there is the totally failing customer service - unless you are a paying Google Apps Premier or a Google Apps Eduction user there is no way to directly contact support - which can be very frustrating especially when as a result of another (silent) software update vital documents become unavailable.

Cloud - Yet Google Docs holds a big promise - it is a great way to have you office in the cloud - but beware of the days your internet connection goes awry - Google Docs Offline (using Google Gears) has been retracted and now we have to wait for HTML5 and the browsers that will bring it back - so no connection to the cloud means no office apps and no documents.

Yet there are about 5 million companies with 25 million users that have access to Google Docs - can these all be wrong? The sad truth is that they will vote with their feet if Google Docs will not soon be up to par with the competition - as until now Google Docs has been hardly more than a Works-on-the-Web.