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."
http://www.communitytechnology.org.nyud.net:8090/d atabases/screenshots/mywebos.gif
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)
Who would want to keep their Buffy/Faye lemons...err, important business documents on someone else's server?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
OpenOffice.org is a passable imitation of Microsoft Office, but I think it would be really great if someone rewrote everything in JavaScript and let me run it inside a web browser instead of a mature desktop operating system.
For more information, click here.
And a Google car, a Googledog and I want to clone myself on Google; Google Self.
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.
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot. Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
http://www.eyeos.org/
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
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.
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot. Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
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
http://www.writely.com/
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
To me this does not sound like a plausible commercial idea as of yet. The one place I do see this as being possibly successful would be the corporate sector. You could just buy a small server that ran everybodies office application on the corporate intranet. No need for massive amounts of installs and it would have some interesting ways of document sharing.
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.
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.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Seems nifty and all. Why doesn't it have a web browser ? Come on an OS without a browser, just wont make it. A browser would make it able to run, this new online operating system. With office suit and all, although it doesn't have a browser.
I just had a listener post his experieneces with web-based project management, and basecamp was among those he tried, with not a very good opinion of it. Based on the few remarks about basecamp, I'm rather surprised that a company so apparently publicly devoted to 'usability' overlooked such basic things.
http://fireboxstudios.com/news/newapp
creation science book
Google google is fine for google, however for web apps google google would be very easy for Google. But what about Google Google? Google google google would be Google's to google. Consider:
Google Google - the google of the google google.
Right, that should cover this week's upcoming tech news pretty succinctly.
Thin, web-based clients have been a good idea for a long time
This is a terrible idea (It's also not really thin client).
Here are a couple scenarios: Internet down? OH CRAP, I just lost my work. Internet Down, "Ah, the word processor is down". CRAP I just hit the back button.
Ideas like this can learn a little bit from the emergence and acceptance of services like Vonage. It layers complexity onto a currently reliable system - Vonage customers experience downtime on average 20 minutes a day, usually at peak hours. Can you imagine how mad you would be if your phone stopped working at peak hours? With VoIP we're more tolerant becuase it's more complicated. It would not be the case with Bell South, Verizon, SBC, QWest or any of the other carriers.
The same goes for a web office suite. Adding the requirement of an internet connection to run the software (and not just a dial up connection) introduces reliability issues in an otherwise pretty reliable system. When you have the option of having an always available, stable, fast software suite on your pc, ready to go to work at anytime or the possibility of headaches equivalent to 1998 PC or Mac crashes which is better?
So apart from the fact that your future web enabled office suite is going to be less reliable than your current suite let's consider speed. An SSL'd version of an Ajax app is going to be slow. It will be noticably slow. Basic things like typing will be fine but operations like spell checking, saving loading, any sort of wizard operation. Moving data between the browser and the server is not a fast operation in ajax.
Why make it more complicated than it needs to be?
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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
Yahoo Mail already has a Calendar (like Microsoft Outlook) and Notes (like Microsoft NotePad) added a couple more apps doesn't seem far fetched.
an open-source Office Suite with my company. We have been planning for a long time and we have started work on our word processor , calendar , address book & slideshow.
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.
I've always wanted automatically placed subject-related ads in my inter-office memos.
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.
RFC2518 and RFC3253 already give you a protocol to make the web editable and you can even version your documents. Have a look at http://www.webdav.org./
So there is no need to invent something new for webbased document management. First servers and clients already exist.
It was a really good paper.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.