Several sources around the web have been citing reports that Google may be close to taking the "beta" tag off of their Docs & Spreadsheets product so they can begin charging corporate clients for use of the service (we assume only the corporate clients).  I see no problem with Google charging corporations, who can have hundreds of users, for the use of their products.  In fact, I think it could be a great new revenue stream for Google.

But simply taking the "beta" tag off a product does not mean it's ready to become a paid product.

I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to write my blog posts.  I like using it because the formatting and spell-checking abilities are better than the built in WordPress features.  But it's not a product that I'd ever pay for.  Right now, anyway.  It's been a little on the problematic side for me, especially over the past month or so.

Sporadically throughout the day it just decides to hang for up to a minute.  Sometimes it has rendering issues and the buttons, menus, and links are replaced by ugly text links that overlap and become all but unusable.  Other times it causes my browser to crash.  Sometimes dialog boxes fail to load.  But because of the way the program creates those dialogs (by blacking out the screen and making the main window un-clickable), the entire document becomes unusable.  I have to quit the window and keep my fingers crossed that the auto-save got my last modifications.  Just today I saw an error message that I'd never before.  All of the content in my document disappeared and was replaced with a promise to investigate the issue.

That's nice.  But it doesn't bring my document back.

I also wouldn't recommend Docs & Spreadsheets for companies wanting to use the service to publish to the web.  Some of it's formatting isn't compatible with WordPress.  Upon closer examination, I noticed that it uses paragraph tags with a "nbsp" between them for line breaks.  That looks nice in Docs & Spreadsheets.  But when I publish those documents on another platform it creates huge gaps between paragraphs.  Maybe it's just a WordPress issue.

Don't get me wrong.  I think Docs & Spreadsheets has great potential.  Like I said, I use it on a daily basis.  But that's why I'm also familiar with all of the strange quirks that still exist in the product.  And yes, I know that any product is bound to have strange quirks.  But it's one thing when those products are free.  It's another when they cost money.  And isn't that why so many corporations would be compelled to use Docs & Spreadsheets - to free themselves of the quirks of Microsoft Office?

The product should be more stabilized before Google starts charging people to use it.  No software product will ever be perfect.  Bugs and issues will also exist.  But the basics should work… and work without a hitch.  Maybe Google needs to invest in more/better hardware to power the service.  Maybe they need to change the way dialog boxes are handled.

I'd be more than willing to pay a few bucks to use Docs & Spreadsheets… when it stops flaking out on me.

Note:  Even now, as I'm trying to transfer this post over into WordPress… Docs & Spreadsheets is refusing to load.