I use Google Desktop dozens of times daily. I suspect lots of enterprise users are in the same XP boat without a fast search paddle.

You might be interested in:

http://www.voidtools.com/

http://www.launchy.net/

Not affiliated, just a fan of both tools.

I recently started at a small company; Google Desktop is installed on most people's machines, but people have installed it themselves, rather than IT doing so. To me, that is the definitive "I have made a user-friendly product" feeling.

I used Google Notebook for a while, but I thought they shut it down years ago, not long after I escaped with my notes to Evernote.

I love Google notebook. They stopped developing it a while ago, but I've been using it a lot anyway. It's my favourite no-frills note taking app in the cloud. I guess now I will have to move to something else.

I would love to use a simple editor which syncs to my Dropbox text files. I've seen some apps which do that but they try too hard to be cool and go overboard with their javascript animations, making them unusably slow. I might write my own.

I wrote Noogle Goatbook (http://www.nooglegoatbook.com/) 2 years ago when they first announced Google Notebook was being discontinued. It's still a little rough but I might continue working on it and/or stick it on github if people are interested.

That is the most awesome product name ever. And it looks quite good too.

It's a shame it's hosted on Google App Engine though. Given their new pricing changes, you might have to move it. Maybe you should launch Noogle Gap Engine...

It is more of a todo tool but you might like http://todotxt.com/

Relatedly, the gmail tasks have a little-known fullscreen UI: https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas?pli=1 Also a mobile webapp.

There is Simplenote (http://simplenoteapp.com), which is a pretty no-frills web app that also integrates with a number of native apps (including Notational Velocity if you're on OS X).

Google Docs has a competing product to almost every MS Office component. OneNote is a staple to the MS Office family. I'd really like to know why Google deprecated Notebook. It was a great product.

It wasn't an escape if they kept it around years after you stopped using it.

I use Google Desktop. My corporate mail is in outlook 2003, and this is what makes it usable.

You're lucky. Our corporate email is Lotus Notes. The only reliable way to search it is using Google Desktop, which is what my coworker uses. I, on the other hand, copy the occasional email I need to reference into a text file

I actually really liked fast flip as an interface to google news. I was hoping they'd expand on that, perhaps making it an alternate interface to Reader (the Google RSS Reader).

So to answer your question, an RSS reader as sound as Google Reader but with a better interface is still an unsolved problem, IMO, and FastFlip was on the right track.

Fast flip provided absolutely brilliant way of news browsing and skimming, I will miss it a lot as well.