There's an awful lot of talk this week about .docs. And not just .docs, but also .odf files. The first bit of news related to Microsoft's collaboration with Facebook. It's produced www.docs.com, which allows Facebook users to share doc files on their Facebook pages. I was unaware that people needed this ability, as I thought Facebook was for fun, and LinkedIn was for the serious business that .docs imply. But it would seem I was incorrect.

The other kerfuffle this week was the news that Oracle would begin charging for the ODF plugins Sun created to convert ODF to Doc. Much has been made of this link, wherein Oracle shows the plug-in to cost $90 per user, with a 100 user minimum purchase. One can't help but figure this will hurt OpenOffice.org adoption. But as a long time OpenOffice.org user, I am sorry to say that this is the least of that project's worries...

At the end of the day, both of these news items are pointless in the long run. I think its becoming clearer every day that our future does not require locally stored documents, nor does it include file formatting worries. Oh, developers will still have to worry about converting from one type to another, but really, they'll do all those things on the server-side, not on the client-side. 

Last week, I installed the Flow binaries of Google's Chrome OS on my wife's rinky-dink Acer Aspire One Netbook. It's a tiny machine that always chugged like a sputtering train uphill when I ran Ubuntu on it. The cheap SSD internal hard drive died, so I moved her over to a USB flash drive with Chrome OS on it. I have to say, this really will be the future of computing. And it's got nothing to do with Google's take on the operating system. It has everything to do with simplicity.

With the Chrome OS, the laptop becomes nothing more than a browser. There's no desktop, no local applications. You have to configure wifi or ethernet, first, but beyond that, it just works. How do you turn a Chrome OS machine off? You push the power button and it turns off. Simple as that. I don't think I've seen a computer in 20 years that could survive its power switch being hit like a light switch, without requiring a quick disk check on reboot.

I don't want to sit here and love on Chrome OS. Frankly, I would never use it on my work machines. But for less technical users who only care about the Web and simple office tasks, it's a dream. Of course, it's also quite far from finished. You can't print while using Chrome OS, for example.

The biggest worry in the transition was my wife's school-work. She's working on some degrees right now, and she has to write an awful lot of papers. She also has to read a lot of .doc files. As a former Ubuntu user, she also had some old ODF files lying around. 

But when we uploaded both types of these documents to her new-fangled Google Docs account, it didn't matter what they were originally saved as. There were formatting glitches, and some things didn't survive the translation perfectly, but the point here is that it was all handled by the server. The end user just fed the documents to the server, and the server made them usable. No dialog boxes, no configuration.

So, while the ODF versus .doc battles will continue to rage as time goes by, I remain confident that it is only the developers who will care about such things in the future. And any time a software concern can be abstracted to the point where only developers worry about it, the end users always win.