Last evening I was once again confronted with a friend’s request for a recommendation for an external hard drive. The question is a recurring event for me since my friends all know me as a Tek guy! I think my friend was a bit surprised when I told him my recommendation was to not buy another hard drive! After a bit of a pause he said, “but I am out of disk space and I need more room to store my pictures and music.” That is when I asked him if he was going to buy 2 hard drives?

“2 hard drives, I thought you just told me to not buy a another hard drive”, exclaimed my friend! Money talks and now I had my friends attention. After a brief round of questions about the value of his photographs, music, and other digital items that warranted saving on a hard drive, the reason for the 2nd hard drive was a little more obvious.

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I am sure everyone has experienced the most recent round of Adobe Reader 8.x updates. Wow what a huge program! Check your install folder location and join me in shaking your head at the offensively large space footprint Adobe is taking with the release of the 8.0 reader. Of course Adobe reader has never been small but it is now starting to verge on being ridiculous.

Most of us simply need to read a PDF file every so often and Adobe 8 should not own a huge chunk of disk space simply for that occasional PDF read. Check out the FREE reader offered by CADKAS.com. Less than 1MG of total footprint impact on your hard drive. Size does matter and small is “big” when it comes to technology.

While most of the world knows Google because of their extremely powerful search engine, few people know that Google is an application company too. Given the enormous development resources as well as financial resources available to Google, it should come as no surprise that Google has been developing a host of Internet delivered web-based applications. What is a surprise is just how good those applications are and better still, how inexpensively Google has priced their applications.

Within the Google Apps services there are two product offerings: The first level of offering is the Google Apps Standard Edition. It is provided for the incredibly inexpensive price of FREE! The second level of offering is the Google Apps Premier Edition. While the Premier edition is not free, at $50.00 per user, per year charge works out to only $4.17 per month, or less than .14 cents per day. Not exactly free but considering the offering and included per user mail storage space, it is as close to FREE as one can get!

As one would expect the differences between the Standard Edition and the Premier Edition are primarily in the storage space provided as well as the ability to turn off or on the Google in-application advertising. With the Standard Edition individual user accounts come with 2Gig of mail storage and there is no ability to turn off the in-application advertising. In the Premier Edition Google advertising is optional and each user account comes with 10Gib of mail storage.

The in-application advertising and mail storage limits aside, both solutions offer effectively the same set of applications. Within each offering Google provides web based email services, web based office automation applications such as a word processor, a spread sheet application, and a web-based presentation application. In addition to the office automation solutions, the Google Apps provide an Internet chat solution that includes file sharing and transfer as well as VOIP voice communication. Lastly each offering provides for a single sign on solution to gain access to all of the product services as well as the ability to have a web site with a number of site templates offered to facilitate easy and fast implementation of a web presence. Most amazing of all is that each offering is done with using one’s own domain name. Google will work with a domain name already acquired by an individual or organization or they will assist one in registering a new domain name.

One only need to take a quick “Google” to find similar product offerings and it will become readily obvious that comparable offerings are not even close to the price of even the Google Apps Premium Edition solution. As it was said earlier, the Google Apps offering is FREE or as close to FREE as one could possibly expect.

Relying on the old adage that “you get what you pay for” it would seem that FREE would imply the Google Apps offerings are probably not that compelling and or useful. In Part Two of the continuing article series, the specific applications will be reviewed and while it may seem on the surface that with the price of FREE or nearly FREE one can’t expect too much, it is not true. What one will discover is the Google Apps offering breaks the adage of “you get what you pay for” and turns the whole notion of the future of computing technology upside down.

Over the course of time I have come to realize that I am going to be writing a lot of articles about the world of Google. Given that realization, I have decided to create an entire section devoted to the Google Articles. I apologize if anyone has linked and or bookmarked on the prior articles. What I will do is post a brief summary of the old and new articles on the home page and that way it should be easier to find the articles further in the site.

While most of the world knows Google because of their extremely powerful search engine, few people know that Google is an application company too. Given the enormous development resources as well as financial resources available to Google, it should come as no surprise that Google has been developing a host of Internet delivered web-based applications. What is a surprise is just how good those applications are and better still, how inexpensively Google has priced their applications. (A site change has been made and now there is an entire section devoted to Google Apps. Please find the full original article at this link!