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."

Comments

It was called myWebOs

[rylin]

http://www.communitytechnology.org.nyud.net:8090/d atabases/screenshots/mywebos.gif

Now this is interesting.

[jeffs72]

Personally, I haven't paid for a copy of office in something like, uh. Well, I've never paid for a copy of office actually. But would I be willing to pay some sort of subscription fee type deal for not only an office type app suite, but one that while I was at work I could get to my home documents, or on vacation, etc?

You bet your software pirating ass I would! Provided it was SSL enabled anyway, one thing that chaps my hide is that all these free email clients don't have any security on them. That sort of keeps me from using goggle mail for anything but fluff email.

But a full blown web office suite that was an online repository for my data. That's smart. I really hope that someone can get this to production, and have an easy was to do an import of old office stuff that actualy works without losing formatting and whatnot.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Am I the only one ... ?

[SamSeaborn]

Am I the only one who thinks the richness of interfaces you can build with AJAX is being blown way out of proportion?

If I was going to implement "Google Office" I would do it with Java Swing or maybe Macromedia Flex. The idea of implementing an Office suite with HTML, Javascript, and AJAX sounds like the makings of one nasty, ugly, kludgey mess of a GUI.

Sam

google should buy 37 signals

[pubjames]

By far the best on-line applications are made by 37 Signals. Google should just buy them - makes much more sense than some of the other stuff they've brought recently and would probably be much cheaper.

Forget Word

[pubjames]

To make the next step in office development suites, we really must completely forget about how Microsoft Word works!

OpenOffice and the other open source office suites all hold themselves back terribly by trying to deal with the Microsoft formats and copying the interface. Guys, doing it that way you will always be playing a frustrating game of catch-up, and you'll never take off.

The next generation office suites I believe will (should) be 1) web based, 2) simple 3) have collaboration built in from the roots.

Come on guys, just stop copying Microsoft Office. It's boring, time consuming and doomed to fail. To compete with Microsoft, forget them.

Adwords in Office?

[G4from128k]

Although I'm sure that Google could do this, its not clear that Google will want to do this. Where's the money? Would Google ads appear in the margins of all my documents while I work on them? Would people accept that intrusion? Would people actually click through? I know that the vast majority of the Office document work that I do would generate $0 revenue for Google because very little of it relates to buying stuff. And for people that work in offices, most of them have little buying authority, so adwords sold on the Office site would be a loser for advertisers.

As much as some people (myself included) would love for Google to kill MS, its not clear that Google has a business rationale for entry into the Office market.

Re:No Thanks

[div_2n]

(If only they could get vba in it)

Do you mean MS VB or just general VB? Because it's already there. I've written macros with it before. Granted in version 1.x the programming environment and documentation was beyond crappy. I haven't explored it in the 2.x beta.

Think Out of the Box

[tmortn]

I see a awful lot of comments about how people would preffer to keep their data local or how the browser is just to limited to really use for an office system of any sophistication but no consideration of other options. Like for example having the option of not storing your documents online... or storing them both on and off line. There are other options to either/or scenarios.

I can't argue that web browsers are terribly limited in this respect though. Which is why I really think the answer is the next generation. There is a theory floating about that google is considering a web providing service... sometimes called a parrallel internet. Well how would one access it? How about portal software? Something similar to AOL but something truly unique under the hood instead of being a cheezy skin over default system utilities? IE Google makes its own browser system that includes HTML rendering but which also goes beyond. Something similar to Google Earth only instead of rendering a 3d globe it is a system designed for word processing and spreadsheets. With a large offline component that also uses online functions as needed... and perhaps caches the most commonly accessed ones to speed up the process and to deal with Lag. It may even allow for a full offline functionality that syncs up with its online counterpart as available.

Even without a new 'browser' per say lets just say that Google Office is similar to Google Earth. The on and off line components are blended in and toss in a embedded firefox component that you can switch to if so desired for one stop shopping... IE tabs that include your office documents your working on as well as your net windows... system command line ? MP3 playing ? file browser ? its not to long before your talking about an OS portal... then if you make something like a Knoppix distro for sampling it and allow a full install you can design a system from the ground up to blur the line between on and off line in a way that really has yet to happen for the masses. They can use Windows install base as a stepping stone. If they can get to where people are just using windows to access the google progs then a full up OS replacement may then be possible on a scale that would have Blamer tossing a few more chairs around.

Bad Idea

[RAMMS EIN]

This is a bad idea for 2 reasons.

The first reason is from a technology point of view. It's possible to kludge together webpages so that the illusion of an interactive application, but it will be just that; a heap of kludges. With our super fast PCs, it works just about fast enough for simple interactions, provided the latency to the server is not too high. In 20 years of networked GUIs, no good standard for interactive remote user interfaces has emerged; X is too verbose, HTML is too static, and PicoGUI seems to have died.

The second, and probably more important, reason is from a user point of view. You don't want to have your documents only accessible to a program on some other organization's computer. It's bad enough when the documents you store on your own computer are in a proprietary format you're not allowed to know how to process; not even having access to the documents without intermission of a 3rd party is much, much worse. Not just because of the huge potential for lock-in, but also because of the reliability and security aspects.