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In what has now become an annual ritual, we’ll be offering a brief review of the stories we covered this past year, and we will be handing out a number of technology awards to a few truly outstanding products and services.
In past years, I’ve offered up awards in three categories: hardware, software, and rookie of the year. Software and hardware contestants can be either new products, or improved versions of existing products, that are capable of having a positive impact on your practice. They can be either industry specific products, or general purpose products. Rookie of the year contestants are new products used by financial professionals that may not yet be perfected, but that either break new ground or hold great promise for the future.
This year, I did not review quite as many hardware products as in the recent past. Nothing I covered here was worthy of an award, so we will not be anointing a hardware winner this year. Next year, we’ll try to spend a bit more time evaluating hardware, and we hope we will find something worthy of award status.
In the meantime, the 2004 winners in the software and rookie categories are….
Best Software
There’s never a shortage of good software products to review, and this year was no exception. While I was really tempted to give the award to an industry-specific product, in the end, I felt compelled to give the 2004 software award to Google.
One would be hard pressed to think of another company that has had a more profound impact on the way we work than this year’s winner. In years past, Google changed the way we search for information on the Internet, and it continues to innovate there. (If you enjoy reading academic research, check out Google's latest search tool beta, Google Scholar.) But the real story this year are two new Google tools: Gmail and Google Desktop Search.
As we reported in July, Google’s decision to launch a beta version of a Web-based e-mail service caused an immediate upheaval. Within days of Google announcing that Gmail would offer very generous storage limits and e-mail attachments, leading providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo, whose free services overnight became obsolete, scrambled to offer free upgrades, which are just now being implemented in some cases.
Yahoo now offers 250 MB of free storage, antivirus protection, spam protection, and some other helpful features; this in contract to the anemic 4 MB it offered a short time ago. Hotmail has increased storage from a measly 2 MB to 250 MB as well, and it also offers additional tools, including a calendar and antivirus protection. Do any of you think this is a coincidence? You all have Google to thank for the “free upgrades.”
Gmail itself is a fine program. Still officially a beta, Google is limiting the number of people who can sign up, although you can probably find someone you know who is authorized to “invite” you to join. Gmail offers 1 GB of storage, the ability to send large attachments, and very good e-mail management. Google continues to add features (keyboard shortcuts, POP3 access), and the service looks to be a real winner. But thanks to Google, you don’t even have to be a Gmail user to benefit; everybody who uses a Web-based e-mail account has benefited from Google’s innovation.
In a number of talks I’ve given at industry events recently, I’ve referred to the hard drive as “the final frontier.” There’s a load of information sitting on hard drives in every office, but much of it cannot be found and put to optimal use when needed. Without going into a lot of technical detail, trust me when I say that the search capabilities built into your operating system are far from satisfactory. Not only are they slow, but they often fail to find everything that you are searching for.
Another Google innovation, Google Desktop Search, also in beta, promises to revolutionize the way we search for information within our organization. This tool definitely needs some refining, but it promises huge productivity gains in the near future. Not surprisingly, many competitors are working to deliver similar desktop search engines. Whether Google or one of its competitors ultimately conquers this final frontier, all computer users stand to benefit.
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