Thursday, November 6, 2014

A tech agnostic no more: Google wins

I've never understood the hardware wars between Microsoft and Apple. While I happen to be most comfortable in an MS windows environment, I've never been fanatical about it. I grew up with a TRS-80, then a Commodore 64, followed by MS-Dos based machines. Now my laptop runs Windows 7, I have an iPhone, I'm comfortable experimenting with Edubuntu, and I use Google for most of my apps.

So I've been a little startled to find myself becoming increasingly convinced that one platform is superior to the others out there.

I've been struggling with how to explain why Google has become my go to tool for almost everything. This has become a challenge because so many of my co-workers and fellow teachers are more comfortable with Microsoft Office.

Thanks to a conversation I had while ago visiting another school to talk technology, I think I finally have the words to explain it.

I'm going to use the analogy of tools.

Let's say that Microsoft Office is a set of screwdrivers like these:

This is a very dependable set of screwdrivers. It will put in all of the standard types of screws very well. (Office, Excel, Powerpoint, etc...) I'd even go as far to say that there are no better screwdrivers than these.

Google's version of these tools is like this screwdriver:

Again, it will put in all the standard screw types. (Docs, Spreadsheet, slideshow, etc...) But it actually isn't quite as good. Sometimes the bits fall out, sometimes they get stuck. It does the job, but not quite as well.

If we were to simply do a comparison of these two sets of tools based on how well they put screws in then Microsoft wins hands down. The MS Office set of tools is better when it comes to making documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows.

Why then even consider Google?

Because you aren't limited to the standard set of screws. You can take those bits out and replace them with all sorts of other tools.


In my school we've recently added Read and Write for Google, we make use of TypingClub, and we are continuing to explore more and more of these additional tools that synchronize effortlessly with Google. If we want video calls we can use Google Hangouts. If we want to create blogs we use Blogger, when we want a system to share documents with students easily we can use Google Classroom, and the list goes on.

We haven't even covered how easy it is to share and collaborate in Google, which is one of its greatest strengths.

What's more I think that more and more tools will become available inside the Google environment. Google seems to be working with more of an open box environment which allows third party developers to easily bring their tools inside the Google cloud based structure.

For all these reasons I have become convinced that Google is the tool and platform that schools should be selecting now.

Of course, I might be wrong. Perhaps Microsoft will figure out what it's missing and manage to catch up. It's done it before. But today, right now, Microsoft cannot deliver what Google can.