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Microsoft Renovates Office Suite as a Web Service
foobsr writes "According to an article in EcommerceTimes, Microsoft is trying to migrate Office from a product to an online service with a focus on automating collaborative work. Quote: 'Making collaboration faster, easier and more efficient will be the next revolution in worker productivity, and we want to be in the forefront,' said Peter Rinearson, vice president for new business development in Microsoft's information worker group"."
But for Microsoft, which is starting to see its growth slow, reinventing that suite of old reliables including Word, Excel and PowerPoint has become nothing less than a key to its future.
Umm.... Yeah. I remember when MS finally decided to get on the Internet bandwagon, and started putting "Internet functionality" in every single one of their applications. Remember how poorly that was implemented, and how little of value they were actually able to add to the various Office apps?
I don't see this as being much different. Buzzwords, ooh-ahh's from the PHBs, but little increased value for the end user. Collaborative PowerPoints? Um... Ok. Isn't that what source code control systems are for, even for binaries? Pure vaporware, baby. I mean look at this:
The new design makes programs like Word, Excel and Outlook e-mail part of collaborative work spaces. In theory, an employee working in Word could tap into all the corporate information on a customer or project.
What? What the heck does that even mean? Sounds like they're dreaming about some sort of uberlayer on top of all Office apps that will let you somehow get information no matter where it's stored. AND do it collaboratively.
*cough*
Righty-o. Believe it when I see it, chappies.
I hope they don't mean a web service as in a C#/ASP.NET web service. I played around with those some. They are very fast and easy to work with, but not half as responsive as a native application. I've always liked plain old simple programs, and hope MS changes there mind if it is anything like what I've used (I'm probably wrong and it isn't, didn't RTFA).
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I think this is a reasonable goal, but like mankind Microsoft shouldn't evolve too quickly. Office still has its share of problems and I would really dread the day when my boss says lets put all of our work and research online. The net and any online collaboration programs are way too risky for my taste.
What are the odds that these applications will run on something besides IE? Is this the real reason Microsoft was talking about making a new version of Internet Explorer?
Or am I completely misinterpreting what they mean by Web services?
As quite a few people have started realising, the web is the platform of the future. There will always be room for locally run 3d graphics apps/games, but the web just makes sense for business apps.
Joel on Software has a good article here.
Since the win32 API is meaning less and less, now is open sources chance to win the API wars :) I'd love to see a mozilla based explorer.exe replacement. Easily customised, easy to lock down for sysadmins, open source, cross platform. It would make migrating from windows to linux be painless, as the interface would be the same. You could transition incrementally. If you still need office, run windows for a while with the replacement shell. Then, as people get comfortable with the new environment, move them to wine or open office.
I can think of heaps of reasons to switch to a shell i've got full control of. Security being a major one. XUL apps too; you could quickly whip up an app in XUL + javascript which would do all your database transactions. What companies don't have a database of some sort?
Also, Bill G. recognizes that the medium itself is but the vessel. What goes in the vessel is the future. MS wants to sell you the server OS that gives MS content (Office and other apps) to a MS desktop, all bundled nicely together with Longhorn and the ability to ship sandboxed code over the 'net.
Let's not forget the reason we all moved to webapps in the first place: single distribution that updates for everyone at once. No more multiple versions and testing on all sorts of configurations. The next version will be the single one they keep on the server, and the configuration will be the IE web browser.
MS Office over the internet will succeed where the Java Web Start failed. Soon to follow will be the anti-virus guys, because it's already here and I'm sure TrendMicro would also like to dump the development costs of a desktop client for an all web one.
This one is a good call by MS.
I remember working on a web version of Wordperfect 10. It was using a tool like Citrix or Webex to deliver the applicaion over the internet from Corel to your desktop. Pretty neat way to try out software IMHO.
I see now that they've dropped in in favor of a stripped down demo download. I'm curious to know why they took it down, as it might be a good reason for Microsoft NOT to run Office as a web service.
Anyone remember this? Anyone know why it went away?
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:wq
Kinda makes you wonder what reverse engineers, keygen programmers, and software crackers are going to do when they have to pirate a web service instead of a normal app.
Oh well let them charge via subscriptions, thats the best way for them to dig their own graves.
...But it's already a reality. For example, I have been working on a project for BMW that is just that: a freak hybrid between Powerpoint and CVS. It's implemented in Flash on the client side, and backed up with a Linux machine running Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL.
Images and documents are stored on a central webserver. All administrative interaction is mediated through the flash application. The editing environment is the playback environment. All relevant historical assets and information are immediately available. And, one of the design requirements was that the whole thing needed to run on Macs, so I don't see anything from Microsoft edging it out anytime soon. The project is like a poster child for Joel Spolsky's recent "How Microsoft Lost The API War" article.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding what they mean by "web service" here -- but it sounds like they want the application on their server and the user is always a client. I don't know if I trust the MS server with that much access to my data.
Even if it's a pure web service, why do you assume that you are required to use Microsoft's server? Ever hear of an intranet where you run your own web apps?
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I tend to agree with the first part of your post. The webservices stuff might be useful to large enterprise clients, but home office/small business users aren't going to pony up for the IT overhead or learn new ways of working-- the benefit is just too low. I've got several small business clients and I can attest that things like getting a four-person workgroup to learn Microsoft Project, or a small office to maintain shared calendars just don't fly. So too, webservices-style collaboration. Already I see sluggishness in Office 2003 that I attribute to the overhead of running an MS SQL server instance for contact management, and god knows what else. I look forward to the day when small businesses start to recognize that Office is for large enterprises and they can avoid the cost and aggravation by adopting Star Office or some other tool.
As for the claim that Office does things too well... not really. It does too much. I was really happy with Microsoft Word 4 for the Macintosh. Most everything since then has been annoyance or misfeature.
I'll be really curious to see how the licensing will be handled. While this model of "services" may be OK for corporate and home use, I wonder how it will go for educational settings.
Currently many of my students have Office on their "home" PCs. They can also use it in the labs, since we have a campus site license.
However, if the software moves to the web and is licensed by campus, will the software's access be limited by (campus) IP address? What happens to the kid that goes home for break and needs to use Word or Excel?
Sure, the campus can add some kind of password system to let the kid access the software via the campus license from home, but now you are adding work to overworked (and underfunded) IT departments.
Yeah, this is going to be interesting to watch.
OK, I'd love to see OpenOffice or some other option take off, but our campus is so bound to Word (hell, I get three line memos in a Word doc attached to an email), I can't see the secretarial force even open to considering a platform change to other software.
Centrally managed, downloadable applets and applications have been built and sold for years. I used to work for two different 3270 companies, and they both had systems that did this, as Web applets, as standalone apps, and as hybrid (split-stack) systems that used a gateway and a somewhat-thin client on the desktop.
Yes, there are a bunch of technological hurdles, none of which are easy to solve. And believe it or not, deploying and running a single version is not always possible. Custom macros, feature / function differences, desktop / color schemes, etc. all end up version-dependent, and sometimes you *can't* roll out a new version even when it's centrally managed.
In any event, what made these systems difficult to accept, customer-wise, was not the technology but the licensing.
How do you license it: by the computer, by the user, by the download? What about the server end -- by the processor, by the server? What about hot-failover clusters? What about the Internet -- do you really want to give access to anyone?
There was no simple way to license it, because no matter what you could think of, the customer had a different scheme they wanted to use. The sales force had no consistent pricing method, and since customers talk to one another, the pricing ended up all over the map.
We tried everything, including three "standard" pricing models that we thought would cover everything including a razor blade / handle model, and we still couldn't reach agreement with the customers on pricing.
Microsoft has these headaches all the time, just ask anyone who has dealt with desktop licenses, server licenses, CALs, and Terminal Server licenses for even a medium-smallish business. It will make your head spin. I doubt MS will come up with an equitable subscription service, especially for larger customers, because there are too many other licensing variables in there.
Once you decide on licensing, how do you regulate or enforce it? Tokens, passwords, thresholds, group memberships? Most customers resist active enforcement, preferring word-of-honor agreements and true-ups when necessary (such as with threat of audit).
The technology is solvable. The licensing is a muddle and is the biggest hurdle to overcome for these service-based proposals.
Because of security reasons, there are plently of us that will NEVER be on the internet - ever.
There are plenty of us out here that must work in a realm where anonymity and the ability to purchase items with 100% zero strings attached is a first order requirement.
We pay for cash for all hardware and software, and we CAN NOT EVER "register" software because if we did, we'd go to jail. We can get updates from the internet, but its a 1-way street via sneakernet and a lot of shredded CD-Rs.
If/when Microsoft requires access and knowledge and subscriptions to software is the day we'll all switch to Linux and OpenOffice.
What kills me is, like always, instead of looking ahead proactively and seeing the path ahead, they will probably be forced to make a radical change at the end, and we'll be running on Windows 2000 until 2010. (NSA has NOT approved XP for desktop use, even though its being installed all over the place).
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So what if MS comes up with a way to turn GPL software into Web-distributed applications which, in some twisted legal sense, they are installing on their computer which you just happen to be using...
What you say makes sense for Xerox, partly because if you quit paying for the service you still keep all your old documents. All you lose is future service.
But what do you do if when you quit paying your "Word service tax" you can no longer open any of your existing documents?
Farfetched? Perhaps, but keep in mind that it would be totally possible with a web based service model, and don't forget the DRM they are already putting in Office documents. Lose the ability to decode the document and you can't use it at all.
Sometimes meetings are needed. But there are a few good ways to keep them good and short.
1) remove all chairs from the room
2) no snacks, water, coffee or anything else (and forbid people from bringing them in)
3) schedule all meetings at 4:30pm. Anyone who talks after 5:00pm has to pay overtime to everyone out of their own salary
4) each person can have 2 minutes to talk. Any time over that costs them $5/minute/person in attendance
5) each person can have 3 slides. Any slides over that costs $5/slide/person in attendance
Offering Office as web services is a means to an end, and that end is collaboration. Deploying it as a web service on the Internet or on an intranet server will be a challenge, and we'll see how it works for Microsoft.
Collaboration is sorely needed even on the most basic things. It's not just for "time wasters" or beaurocrats. Even if I just want to document an important process or how some critical service was installed, it's seems like it's a herculean effort to publish and maintain such documents, among several people. And sometimes a document starts with only one person involved, and later it needs to be read and maintained by a whole group, all of a sudden.
In many companies we need simple things, like:
A content management system (CMS) deals with this sort of stuff. Oracle has a collaboration suite. There are many open-source CMS. SharePoint certainly tries to be a CMS. And there's Lotus Notes. But no CMS seems to dominate, and I haven't found one that is easy to implement and easy to use to share documents.
But hang on, isn't that old tech? Hasn't IBM got a load of patents in this area? *shivers* in anticipation....
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