IBM To Publish Java Office Suite

prostoalex writes "The Big Blue will bundle J2EE-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics applications in its WebSphere portal. What's more interesting is that the package is server-side, with functionality of the application being delivered to the user over the network. Both CRN (linked above) and The Register considered that a major move against MSFT."

Comments

Re:This is a return to 1980

[TWX]

"First it was dumb terminals then network computers and now this. Its dead give it up."

Do you have ANY idea how useful something like this could be to large environments? Where I work, we have 35,000 computers on the supported list. Two or three different platforms worth, PCs, Macs, and some occasional Linux machines. It would be kick ass if we could deploy one version of one productivity suite across the whole network, especially if we could do it with site based central servers rather than having to work on each and every PC on the fucking network.

If this supports server-side file storage, it's even better, since then we don't have to worry about user data any longer. We'll gladly build fault-tolerant servers if we only have to do it for about a hundred machines, and suddenly we can also roll out upgrades to the products with only a few days' work, not months like we currently have to.

The days of dumb terminals rocked. If one broke, we brought another one out, and swapped. If the server broke, we dropped everything and fixed it. Regardless, the user wasn't without a connection or machine for days at a time like which happens in the Windows world. If Microsoft hadn't managed to con everyone into believing that their dumbass standalone workstation idea was the best, we'd probably be using X-Terms now, and have even better centralization of critical data, rather than every user having to know how to copy their data to the network attached storage (and most of them are not interested in learning).

Just because a computing model is old doesn't mean that it's outdated.