Wouldn’t it be cool if Google made its clipboard an open standard and invited Web-productivity competitors such as Zoho and SlideRocket and…even Microsoft…to support it, too?

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You get 1GB of storage for free, and can store files up to 250MB in size; additional space is 25 cents a gigabyte a year, the same lowball price as far the Gmail/Picasa storage. The company is also rolling out a version of this offering for big companies that use the fee-based version of Google Docs; that one charges $3.50 a gigabyte a year, but permits automated syncing of files through a new version of Memeo and other apps.

None of this is anything radical, but there’s one interesting feature; Since Google Docs lets you share folders with colleagues, it’ll be easy to upload files of any sort which relate to a collaborative project you’re working on, so everyone involved can get at them. Which seems to be the basic benefit that Google is trying to provide here.

This still isn’t the Gdrive that people used to fantasize about–the one that let users store 100% of their data online and easily sync it between multiple devices. Probably for free. But it’s the closest that Google has come to date.

Incidentally, Google’s explanation of the new feature says “Google Docs now supports files up to 250MB in size.” When I try to upload existing files for editing in Google Docs’ apps, it still warns me that there are file-size limits: 500KB of text for word-processing files, 10MB for presentations, 1MB for spreadsheets, and 10MB for PDF files. Those caps are small enough that they’ve sometimes prevented me from using files in Google Docs.  I hope they’re going away, but I have a query in to Google for clarification.

[UPDATE: A Google representative told me the limits are still in place.]

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Google’s entire premise is based on vaporware: It is promising to update Google Docs within the next year so that it will meet “the vast majority’s needs,” Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division told ZDNet Asia in an interview published on Friday.

Google is planning “thirty to fifty” updates that will make Docs more capable and on par with Google Mail and Calendar, Girouard said. He believes that businesses do not use Google Docs because it has not reached the same level of maturity as those products.

If Microsoft made a similar pronouncement, it would have been immediately dismissed as peddling vaporware. Even if Google gets it right, there is no guarantee that enterprises will make the switch for a multitude of reasons.

I believe that Girouard is overreaching with his marketing message. Organizations have standardized on Word, and have processes built around it. Switching would require training, and replacing software that is built around it.

Issues such as electronic discovery and staying compliant with privacy laws also come to mind. Who will own the data, and where will it reside? Will developers be content with the APIs that Google provides, and will they extend its functionality to be more business-friendly? Microsoft is years ahead building out the Office ecosystem.

Moreover, there are very good free and open source alternatives to Word that exist today–not at some nebulous date next year. Yet, Office still remains dominant, and Microsoft is also not resting on its laurels: Office 2010 beta 2 includes some Web services, and it has hosting partners.

Girouard made another point that begs more thoughtful analysis. “…I don’t think Office will entirely disappear, Instead, Microsoft’s offering will become a specialized offering for office workers who need its additional functions, akin to Adobe Photoshop, which is targeted at skilled workers,” he told ZDNet.

Presently, most Google’s products are aimed at consumers. I am not familiar with any large enterprises that run them aside from universities that have cut deals with Google to administer their Web mail. Students have little influence over the purchase, and any complaints likely go unheeded. Businesses don’t play that way.

The time may come when most businesses do turn to Web services for productivity software. Salesforce.com has proven that mission-critical business applications can be run remotely reliably. However, the big shift will not happen next year, and Microsoft will be a part of it.

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It’s easy to figure out why Google’s shedding the beta label: It’s devoting considerable energy to the for-pay version of Google Apps aimed at corporate users. For some of the IT managers who’ll decide to adopt (or avoid) Google Apps, the beta label might as well read this product is a rough draft that shouldn’t be rolled out to large numbers of people unless you want support headaches. In fact, it’s kind of amazing that Google left the beta identifier on a service it was selling to big business for so long.

Google isn’t doing away with its beta labels altogether–Knol, for instance, still sports one. But I wouldn’t object if the company used them sparingly, and only in the old-school sense: for products that have bugs and rough edges which the company intends to eliminate on a set schedule. That was a useful term, but it’s been almost completely devalued.

Once upon a time, Google’s betamania was a fun idiosyncrasy, and it felt like Google was letting the world in on stuff that was exclusive and exciting. But if just about everything is in perpetual public beta, the term has no value. And so many other sites have shamelessly borrowed Google’s approach to beta that it’s no longer entertaining. It’s pretty much redundant.

The Web, by definition, is a great big beta. Come to think of it, life itself is a great big beta…

Here’s more or less incontrovertible proof that Google’s beta label is meaningless: A new Google Labs feature lets you put it back on Gmail if you feel like it. How about other choices, like “Early Alpha” or “Service Pack 11?”

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Last night, the company added drawing tools to Docs’ word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app. They’re based on technology Google picked up from a company it acquired called Tonic Systems, and it’s not surprising that it took them this long to show up–the precision and interactivity required by graphics tools are among the hardest things to implement in a browser, at least if you try to do so without using Adobe’s Flash,

The tools you get are very basic: You can insert various canned shapes (very similar to the ones in Microsoft Office), fiddle with colors and outline widths, do simple lines and arrows, and change the order of objects. Rather than drawing directly on the page, you work in an editing window.

It’s enough to do extremely simple stuff, such as flow charts:

Or, if you’re ambitious, more elaborate drawings (but mine all look a little like digital Grandma Moses–CorelDraw this ain’t):

The list of features which these drawing tools lack is longer than the one of things it can do. There’s only one font, there’s no way to do gradations or other fancy fills, there’s no drop-shadow effect (although you can fake it), and lines don’t snap into place for convenient flowcharting. And unless I’m missing something, you can’t cut a graphic you’ve created in one Google Docs app and paste it into a different one.

But what’s there works pretty smoothly, and that’s something of an accomplishment. (Google Docs archrival Zoho still doesn’t have drawing tools in its word processor, although its presentation app sports them.) My hope is that Google’s figured out some of the challenging fundamentals of implementing drawing features, and will continue to beef ‘em up until they’re at least vaguely competitive with the most important graphics tools in Office. (If you doubt that there’s still a yawning gap between the features in Google’s apps and those in Office, spend some time with Docs’ presentation tool, and then switch over to PowerPoint 2007; even with the new drawing tools, I wouldn’t build a slideshow in Google Docs unless I didn’t care if it looked like it was done in 1994.)

One of the many reasons I’m looking forward to the arrival of Microsoft’s upcoming online versions of the core Office apps is because they’ll serve as a reality check on Google’s progress to date. And drawing tools are one major area where Microsoft has a shot, at least, at delivering something meatier than what Google Docs has to offer.

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But I’m still learning things from this project, and need to catch up on sharing them with you. Some notes on the last few days:

–I should have mentioned I’ve been using Meebo. When I’m on my MacBook Pro, I generally use iChat for instant messaging. But I’ve sometimes opted for Meebo for just about as long as there’s been a Meebo. And in almost every respect that matters, I like it just as much as iChat. (Exception: iChat is smart enough to reconnect automatically whenever I connect to the Internet; with Meebo, I need to remember to log in…and sometimes I forget.) Meebo is among the very best Web apps on the planet–it’s one of the ones that first made me think it might be possible to live inside the browser.

–A cool use for Google Docs. When I started to put together The State of iPhone Satisfaction, I knew I wanted to turn survey results into infographics. I ended up doing so with Google Docs–and it was not only an adequate Excel substitute but a superior one in some respects, since it lets you “publish” a chart in a form that you can embed in any Web page, and which auto-updates if you change the data behind the chart. Excel would have let me create prettier. more customizable charts, but getting them onto the Web and into my article would have been a lot tougher. (Zoho, incidentally, has a similar publishing feature, but its charting features don’t provide a real-time preview, making them more of a chore to use.)

–Can’t any online spreadsheet open my file? My Google Docs charts were based on summary data from my iPhone survey. But I also downloaded all the responses from all 2158 participants from PollDaddy in the form of a 2MB .CSV file. I then tried to upload it into Google Docs–and was reminded that Google Docs can only import spreadsheets up to 1MB. So I tried Zoho–which told me that one of the file’s field names was too long, and gave up. Whereupon I moved onto ThinkFree, and discovered, after a week with the Mini-Note, that it didn’t have Java installed. (There was a time when you’d find that out really, really quickly.) I installed Java, and…ThinkFree successfully opened my file. It wasn’t a perfect experience–the ThinkFree spreadsheet mysteriously pauses in places where Excel reponds instantly–but ThinkFree gets major brownie points for working where Google Docs and Zoho didn’t. (Surely big companies like GE that are adopting Web suites need to import big files; I wonder what they do?)

–Graphics continue to be tricky. I still haven’t found a way to whip up little images for my posts that’s anywhere near as easy and powerful as Photoshop. Aviary continues to look terrific in principle, but I keep building graphics in it and then getting an ugly, uninformative error message when I try to save them. (I did manage to use it to put together the image with this post.) So I keep coming back to Picnik, which is a photo editor that’s really not designed to do the sort of things I’m trying to accomplish. But it’s extremely reliable, and I’m usually able to approximate the effects I want. I used Picnik to create my iPhone Survey logo (settling for a font other than Rockwell Bold, which I usually use–it wasn’t available) and this image. But mostly, I’ve been trying to steal graphics from the Web that only need cropping and/or resizing, and reusing old images I’d created in Photoshop, such as my “Operation Foxbook” logo.

(Full disclosure: In certain cases, I cheated a little on Operation Foxbook’s no-desktop app rule by doing a screen capture, then pasting it into Windows Paint and saving it so I could upload it into Picnik. As far as I know, there’s no way to bring a screen grab into any Web image editor without using a desktop app to save it disk first.)

I have a new appreciation for how good Picnik is, but I’ll also be very happy to get my mitts back on Photoshop; no Web-based rival comes close.

I’m going to record at least a few final thoughts on Operation Foxbook in one final post. But come to think of it, even when I turn my MacBook Pro back on and use desktop software without guilt, I wanna continue to do an awful lot of my work in the browser. Maybe I’ll continue to label relevant posts with the Operation Foxbook logo, and let the experiment continue on indefinitely…

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