In the future, I confidently predict, we won't work on our computers.

We'll work in that place that everyone has started calling the Cloud.

Somewhere out there. Not here, not on your hard drive, but there.

Why? And what good will it do us?

Well, the long answer is because it will make so much more sense.

Right now you've got hundreds of documents, photos etc on your computer that no one can get at.

You may think this is a good idea.

But what about if you quit your job to join an ashram? Or keel over with some awful disease that requires that you never use a computer again but have to lie on a beach sipping pina coladas and being waited on by svelte beauties with names like Taff and Timberly?

In the future, so much more of what we do is going to be collaborative, it's going to seem weird to us that we all sat at computers in an office typing away at documents other people couldn't see until we'd finished.

Indeed, this already looks like a flashback to the days of old, when we crouched in front of typewriters, columns of desks fading into the distance. In fact, come to think of it, the desktop computer is still treated a bit like a glorified typewriter.

In the future - already, if you've got a savvy boss - we'll be working on documents together in real time. I can see what you're doing, indeed we can all edit the same document in real time, wherever we are.

That's because the document sits, not on anyone's computer, but in the Cloud. (In reality it sits on a Google computer, somewhere, or on several of them. But you don't need to know that.)

As one person types or edits, so others can watch in real time from their browsers, wherever they are.

(The first time I showed my colleagues this, via Google Docs, they freaked out. "Oh my God!" one of them shrieked, as I deleted words on her screen from across the room. "It's like a creepy horror movie!")

That's the long answer. The short answer is "attachments".

I really, really hate attachments. And it's been the hardest habit, I've found, to get people to break.

For me they're big, unwieldy and unhealthy.

(Unhealthy because it's a favorite means for bad guys to send viruses and Trojans that way, or at least it used to be.)

A good friend of mine, for example, recently sent photos of his house to friends in the hope they might rent it. The attachment was 10 megabytes, clogging everyone's inbox and reducing the appeal of his house by a factor of ten. He's an extreme case, of course. But attachments don't make much sense.

I recently spent a good few hours on one document that had been emailed to me, only to find someone else had been working on a copy of the same document; by the time we swapped our respective masterpieces we realized that there was no easy way to merge everything together.

So now I order all team documents to be edited and stored online. It didn't make me popular but, in my view, it makes life a lot easier:

With services like Google Docs, Zoho, Zimbra, Acrobat.com, you can share a document with as many people as you want, so anyone can update it and see the latest version without combing through their email inbox.

Of course, this isn't perfect yet. These services don't have all the features of Microsoft Word - and I know a lot of people need those bits and pieces, like the commenting feature, where colleagues can snipe at each others' work without actually doing any themselves.

But these kinds of features will quickly seem dated.

The truth is that online actually does a much better job of tracing the history of a document and allowing users to revert to earlier versions. (I've been using something called PBwiki, now called PBworks, to teach my students, as it allows me to track all changes and previous versions of a story.)

This is not rocket science. Nor is it someway off.

A lot of offices are now virtual-in other words, they don't occupy a physical space. A lot of people work remotely, and need to be able to access the same information as people in a physical office.

The team I was working with recently had only limited time and resources, and so using Google Docs meant that we could be collaborating even before the office itself was set up. Adding new people merely meant adding their email addresses to the permitted list of collaborators on the documents we had.

No files and folders to find on hard drives and to email around.

No fiddly servers to set up.

So long as everyone had an email connection we were up and running.

(Some words to the wise: Don't make your online files too big, and give them names that make them easy to remember. Although, ironically, it's actually easier to find a document you've written when it's in the Cloud, it's still bad practice to give files names that don't make sense - especially to other people.)

The next step will be this: Not only should it not matter to you where your file is - on your computer, on someone else's computer, or in the Cloud - nor should it matter what software you use to edit it.

I would like to see Microsoft etc get their act together to make sure that a document on Google Docs can be edited just as easily in Microsoft Word and that as far as the user is concerned, it's seamless.

Right now this isn't the case. It's daft to me, for example, that Google controls the space where all my Google Documents sit. They should sit where I want them to sit, and I should then choose how I access them - whether from a desktop application (clunky but familiar Microsoft Word) or sleek and still unfinished Google Docs.

This will happen.

Then we'll all, I hope, be on Cloud Nine.

Not to be reproduced without written permission from the author. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

Popular

Volcano erupts in North Sulawesi, hundreds evacuated

Dubai roads, airport reel from floods after record rains

Ramadan boosts consumer confidence, retail sales