Slashdot Mirror
Google Office Still in the Wings?
Rob writes "Ajax Office, a proposed project to create an open source, web-based suite of office
applications, has fallen by the wayside. But the project's founder Paolo Massa is
convinced that not only will there be successful open source projects in the space, but
that it is only a matter of time before the likes of Google or Yahoo! launch a web-based
office suite of their own - going up against Microsoft Office but in the online sphere.
"If you think about it, it would mean having access to your office
documents from any browser," he told Computer Business Review, outlining his view
that a provider could enable the creation and storage of office documents on their
web servers. "I think someone will do this within a year," he said."
I would prefer to keep my documents secure and local. And I have Open Office to solve the open source office suite issue. (If only they could get vba in it)
Why is this article getting play on Slashdot?
It's just an interview with someone who tried to build a Web-based office suite and couldn't pull it off. Then the guy speculates that "someone else will do it within a year" with absolutely zero evidence for that contention other than his gut feeling -- he doesn't claim to have talked to any company (Google included) about their plans. Then the journalist takes the guy's wild speculation and stretches it out to Google being the ones who will do it "within a year".
In other words, it's completely unsourced speculation. There's not even enough fact there for it to qualify as "rumor"!
It's bad enough that it's running on CBR's blog, but why does Slashdot just pass along the article, complete with wildly misleading headline? Aren't "editors" supposed to be more about critical thinking than regurgitation?
Oh, I forgot, this is Slashdot. Never mind.
Read my blog.
From dumb terminal to workstation, back to dumb terminal... ah, the odd cycle of computer technology.
Online document editing has many major draw-backs
1) The "online" bit. A large proportion of office document editing is done "off-line" either in-flight, on trains or in establishments with restricted internet access.
2) Printing - You need much tighter integration between the printer and the browser than currently available, its no good generating an A4 PDF when my printer is A3.
3) Its an ASP - Application Service Provider, there have been a few big successes (SalesForce.com for instance) but mainly they tanked. In the office apps perspective its hard to see the business driver, if its just a cost thing then Open Office would win.
4) What do my clients use? Any browser based solution has to have a standard integration and export to MS Office, this is the normal practice and made doubly so now that Google searches all those files on your desktop for you.
5) What is all the power on my desktop for? Dual Core AMD, 2GB RAM etc etc... Office isn't exactly a performance problem.
ASPing Office was suggested by Microsoft and it tanked, its been suggested before and it tanked. I think Google are spot on to not continue funding an idea that has tanked several times before.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Where I work, everything that gets stored on the hard drives at work is immediately considered For Official Use Only and most companies that do business with DoD or other Government agencies have very strict rules on information storage (classification notwithstanding). If a web-based Office Suite were to succeed, there would have to be major security for it to be considered for use by most of the US Government and it's many (many) contractors. It's possible, but whoever tried to implement this idea would have to keep in mind that lots of big-name companies are tied by these restrictions.
If one could develop a web-based office suite that met the needs of DoD/Dod contractors, then I think a lot of them might go for that idea. It would allow a military unit in Iraq and a command post at Ft. Bragg to view/edit their files without having to worry about transmitting them back and forth; likewise for contractors who have to travel all over the country. I know some contractors who travel 100+ days/year, so having a central repository of files would be excellent for them. I think if the security needs can be met, web-based office might just work. It'll be interesting to see if anyone can actually implement it though.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
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And if JavaScriptOffice.org gets hacked, or an overzealous sysadmin blocks access to the site, or your DSL goes down, you can't access any of your documents. I trust my laptop, with its back-up data, far more than I'd trust an Internet-based service.
For more information, click here.
Do you really want government officials, Masters and PhD students, top scientists and engineers, buisnesses (and business employees) etc... to use a web-based office application?
That will never ever happen. Think of the security! What if some hacker hacks away and downloads tons of sensitive documents?
As for Google Office, we all know that they have a bit of a shady GMail privacy policy. Now you want me to trust them with my personal documents?
Imagine a service in the future offered by Google that gives employers the tool to find out more information on a specific person. Imagine the amount of information that can be deduced from all the things you did on Google. They can know a lot about "who you are", your personality etc... just from all the interactions you do with Google itself. Six years ago, everyone didn't realize that Google will be able to search every nook and cranny of the Internet, and that it'll be able to dig up your personal message board posts you thought would be too hidden from a search engine.
You have no idea what the future holds in terms of the advancements in data mining technologies.
I cannot trust Google with my documents... the buck stops right here, right now.
There is absolutely no reason why a web server with this functionality enabled should not be deployed by different organisations with different security requirements. Google itself could offer a free service using context sensitive advertising, a paid for service without...and so create the bandwagon that would get corporates interested. How much would the DOD pay Google for an armed forces wide secure document solution? How much would a large corporate pay to be sure its employees were able to work on shared documents efficiently without all that emailing of stuff around the place, loss of version control, islands of secret knowledge? So far, document management systems have failed to deliver on simplicity, efficiency etc., but the opportunity must be out there.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
NeoOffice/J: about 60% the size of Microsoft Office for Mac, and almost 20% as fast! Isn't Java great?
For more information, click here.
What are you saying now to? The parent poster said nothing about Java, he said JavaScript. You do realize that's what AJAX is based on, right? Javascript!
Throw the bums out!
http://www.writely.com/ - The REAL story is how fast AJAX is changing the web app landscape.
AJAX is the quiet revolution that Google has been lighting a fire under and I doubt MS has anything as nimble or elegantly simple then anything Google might be brewing. VISTA may have some tools to compete at a very basic level... maybe!
In the meantime... there's Writely... which looks pretty mature for a BETA AJAX application.
Welcome to Web 2.0!
...and the browser interface in general. That's been my major problem with web apps. One minute you're working, the next you hit backspace outside of the form and the page disappears.
otherwise, they will fade into history like the many java office suites promoted during the dot-com boom
If someone made this OSS, then coudln't people be free to put it on THEIR server? I don't see any reaosn why we couldn't run the thing on your server and then just access it from anywhere. Wouldn't this be perfect? Security and web access?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
who wanted to keep their money in banks?
What you say is absolutely true. One thing I would mention, though, is that for the most part the email traveling to your GMail account is riding with a sea of other email, taking various routes. It is not always interesting to a listener along one of those routes, since they don't necessarily care about what you are saying in your email.
However, at a public hotspot, it is more likely that people *do* care about what you are saying in your email. Conferences are one example where people are using public wi-fi with many of their competitors within wireless earshot, so to speak. Using SSL to encrypt the last hop is quite useful in this case. This is why Google created the new Google VPN; reading your email with SSL is the same idea, with a less general usage.
Internet connections are simply not this unstable, at least for a significant number of users
The connections are stable, but the network is not. The variability in speed of DNS, Ping Times, etc. is still very high. Any DNS issue at the client is enought to render a web based application like this useless. Have you used a public access point recently that's free? They are usually slow and frequently have connection issues.
There is the consideration of deployment as well. There is one scenario that this application might perform reasonably well in, and *maybe* have some administrative benefits, the corporate intranet. VPN is notoriously slow so I'm not sure that users would get a decent remote experience, but locally it could be usable.
The "administrative issues" for deploying desktop software though are not, these days. Applications can be pushed out to the client through facilities such as active directory, or file shares (linux/unix). Also, most it people utilize disk images when possible, only in the smallest of offices would you do a manual install.
As far as file formats go - whatever office application for the web is created is not going to somehow magically solve file format interoperability issues. In fact an application like this will likely create more work as two parties would need to negotiate a common format before exchangin files.
Home users might use it if it were free - or very, very cheap. But again, do you really want your word processor to be down just because your cable or dsl connection is on the fritz?
The thing thing that is going to stymie adoption is ubiquitous availability. I think that there will be some serious user acceptance (and management acceptance) issues in the corporate area. Not everyone works at the office, employees travel, and while this might perform very well in the intranet scenario, it's going to be less usable over any type of remote connection. Having a help desk field calls re: i can't get to the word processor will be a nightmare. Ususally software issues are realted to "wierd" misconfigurations that end up being resolved by a re-install or a quick bit of tinkering. These happen on a user by user basis. With a server hosted app such as this - the capacity for lost productivity is high, if the server or connection between is down for any reason it causes a massive loss of productivtiy, we are also not talking about file server level application either, the risk of instability from updates and general use is much higher.
It just doesn't make sense really. Why create a situation where your users are more at risk to be unproductive? Cost? How about 2 hours of everyone's time wasted (over 3 years or so) by not having access to their office application. That alone would be enough to justify purchasing office or installing OpenOffice, so that it would be "always available".
As far as the home user goes, there are already too many things that can go wrong with my computer, no need to add another point of failure.
How about a Client Server Word processor, with the ability to check out chapters, a central indexing application, centrally contolled template library, and library access contol and centralised reporting on who has opened and editing documents.
It's been around for over a decade. It's called Lotus Notes.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.