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Have I mentioned how much I love Google Docs & Spreadsheets? No? Well, if you asked me whether I'd rather have an octuple-core workstation with 4GB of RAM or that simple online service on a four-year-old laptop, it would be Google every time. And that's not because I don't love raw computing power. Oh no. If you haven't encountered the service before, visit http://docs.google.com or read our review.

It's not even that I think the Google service is the most technically accomplished of its type: its fresh-faced competitor Zoho (www.zoho.com) was pointed out to me by news and features editor Barry Collins the other day. It's the same concept: a collection of browser-based applications focused primarily around word processing and spreadsheets. The spreadsheet application is amazingly capable and basically knocks seven bells out of Google. But that's fine by me; I'll stick with the big G for now, because the thing about Docs & Spreadsheets that really floats my boat isn't the features, but persistence.

Data persistence is the key feature that's been missing for the 20-odd years that desktop computing has been with us. The horrible demon of obsolescence, upgrades, new versions and enforced lifecycles means it's terribly hard to actually

Web-enabled persistence is the key that can eliminate this nightmare. Persistence means knowing - not assuming or hoping - that your documents are always available and always backed up. And it's a great reason for local application vendors to be worried about Google in particular and online applications in general, because as soon as the world cottons on to how easy it makes things, there's likely to be a huge migration away from local applications.

If you subscribe to the idea that early adopters are the model for the future, and make the pretty safe assumption that PC Pro readers are early adopters, the market for this kind of service is only going to increase. According to our reader survey figures, almost 70% of you have more than one PC in your home, 30% have three or more and around 60% have a laptop. That's a lot of different places for data to be stored, a lot of potential avenues for fragmentation and loss, and a lot of individual hard disks to be kept synchronised.

Synchronising files is the wrong way to go about it anyway: documents should be in one place from the get-go, eliminating all possible problems with sync conflicts, misplaced files and accidental overwrites. This is what Google Docs gives you. Whichever PC you're sitting at, anywhere, your documents are but a username and password away.