Kevin Tea has more than 30 years senior journalistic and marketing communications experience, working with some of the leading newspaper groups and blue chip companies in the UK. Working with the European Commision; contributing to Webweaving, where Bill Gates also contributed; or managing various tech e-journals are some of the feathers on his cap. Currently, his time is distributed between offering a wide range of consultancy, PR and marketing communications services as an independent consultant and covering the web2.0 collaboration market at web2andmore.net.

By Kevin Tea

Every online aficionado's nightmare hit me last week when my four year old computer curled up its little toes and died. The good news in this is that I ordered a new PC with go faster stripes and fluffy dice; the bad news – apart from the fact that after seven days it is probably already obsolete – is that it was going to take a week to arrive. This meant that I wasn't going to be able to have access to my online life – banking, email, documents, calendar etc. Well, that's not strictly true. I managed to monitor three email accounts and Twitter on my mobile phone but the experience won't go down as "did the Earth move for you?" experience!

In order to avoid cold turkey I decided to clear my desk drawers out of years of accumulated cover disks from computer magazines and came across an old cd-rom with a copy of Ubuntu burnt onto it. I slipped it in the cd-rom drive and within minutes it had loaded, I had configured it to access the net via my through the air broadband service and I was back in business.

To many people reading this, there is nothing unremarkable to this. Despite writing a tech blog I am not a technical person, I just like things to work out of the box. You are probably of an age where the Internet has been with you since you learnt to walk, but when I first started on the net it was through typed in string commands, WYSIWYG wasn't even in the frame and web page design was created through hand coded text. Though you may take the net for granted to me it can be summed up in one word – liberation – and this was initially down to Google.

Like many early web adopters I changed my ISP (Internet Service Provider) on a regular basis so my email address was constantly changing which was a PITA when it came to notifying contacts. When Gmail arrived I was presented with a perfectly serviceable email service with the option of POP3 or, more importantly for the mobile web worker, IMAP. I could access mail via a web browser, email client such as Thunderbird or via a mobile phone. Apart from emails allied to my various domains, I will never need to change my email address again regardless of what company supplies my Internet access.

Similarly Google Apps has changed the way that I work, providing a flexibility previously impossible. Last year with two colleagues I had to prepare a major report. With one colleague in the south of the UK and another working in America the old way of preparing a document would be for me to write my part of it and then email it to the others to add to what I have written or insert their own input and then email it all back to me for collating. It's time consuming and prone to errors. Armed with Google Apps all three of us worked on the document in our own real time which resulted in the document being finished quicker than anticipated, there was no need for time consuming collation and for some inexplicable reason there were fewer errors and it read better!

However grateful I am to Google I do not think the company is omnipotent. Some time back they decided not to continue development of Google Notebook which was a light but easy to use webclipper. Now as much as love Evernote there are times when it is too much for simple jotting data from sites. You can still use Notebook in a limited fashion but a little more development and it would have evolved into a wonderful tool.

Then there was the Google Buzz debacle. I have no doubt that Buzz is a wonderful tool but I want my email to handle email, not be a portal to let everyone see what the hell is going on in my world. BY assuming that people wanted to share everything on their Gmail account showed a remarkable naivety on Google's behalf. Most new product development involves research among focus groups – a step Google looks like missing out otherwise Buzz wouldn't have caused such a furore.

And then there's Google Wave, the alleged answer to group collaboration tools which the Big G has announced it is pulling the plug on at the end of the year. There was such a buzz (pun intended) when Wave was launched you had to buy invitations off eBay. Wave had phenomenal potential but someone, somewhere in the Googleplex ran out of steam. I guess the next time I collaborate with someone on Google Docs I’ll be able to tune into his webcam and see his dog licking its balls in the background because Google has promised that elements of Wave will be incorporated into other services such as Docs and – don't they ever learn – Gmail.

In many respects it is good to see that Google has its faults, I just hope that those weaknesses don't cross over into the security setup that guards our online data!