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Google & Sun Planning Web Office
astrab writes "According to this post at Dirson's blog, Google and Sun Microsystems are to announce a new and kick-ass webtool: an Office Suite based on Sun's OpenOffice and accesible with your browser. Today at 10:30h (Pacific Time) two companies are holding a conference with more details, but Jonathan Schwartz (President of Sun Microsystems) claimed on Saturday on this post of his blog that "the world is about to change this week", predicting new ways to access software."
Isn't this what Microsoft has been fearing? Isn't this exactly why they went out to kill Netscape?
Between Sun's passionate hatred of Microsoft and Google's competence, it's got to be a bad day over a Redmond.
"the world is about to change this week"
Yes, accessing applications on a remote server. That's certainly a new, world-changing idea.
Except that it isn't.
Seriously, is there a business model for this or is it just a way to lessen Microsoft's dominance?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Thousands of IT people around the world are loosing their jobs as software and computer needs are all hosted in some remote location by application service providers. "We'd love to keep them around", said the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company, "but it's really not that difficult to reboot my little black box that gives me access to everything I need".
So I wonder how long until we can expect to see a similar service from Microsoft.
My lame blog.
Listen, I know there is some crazy love fest going on over Google because people are just *dying* to see MS knocked down a few rungs. Sure, Microsoft needs this, but the problem is with Google. You know what's 100x worse than proprietary formats? Proprietary hosted databases! Google is basically a huge proprietary hosted database application format, and they want to host everyone in the world on *their* platform. It's not "our" platform in the sense that Linux and the BSD's and other open source software create such a feeling.
r ver&btnG=Google+Search ). Then, Google can provide services around those, but the core stack should be something that I can control where I host and control my own data!
How could it be different? Well, Google would distribute their web apps *including* source code as bundles that could be installed on "personal servers" (like on the thousands of dedicated server companies run by smaller, generally independent shops http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dedicated+se
Think of it this way. How many corporations are going to start to standardize on Gmail? Not my company, and I'm happy for that. People, please see through this nonsense. Maybe we really do need the "click to download source" clause in the GPL v3. Otherwise, people will gladly give up their freedom just to see some lame company with an incredible data center suck away all of their freedom and privacy. Google is completely evil.
If they wanted to be good, the proof would be in enabling other people by opening their software stack and allowing for a much more distributed architecture.
Sorry, I like to own software, or at least have free software that resides on my workstation without fear of intervention. Communal software I never really own -- that I use on a temporary "as long as Google feels like it" basis -- sounds a lot like a M$ rental plan. I don't hear Google announcing free-for-life software, nor anything coming close to a trustworthy privacy policy for all the data they collect about me. Google's Achilles heal is its disregard for privacy protections. I won't hand over my keys to the kingdom no matter what "we're not evil" unsubstantiated promises they tell me.
Seriously, is there a business model for this or is it just a way to lessen Microsoft's dominance?
If it lessens Microsoft's dominance, it's a working business model.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Lets look at this from the reality side folks. How many companies are going to allow any data of any sort outside their environment? Not going to happen. How many companies will enforce security policies that all work done at home or on a Mobile device be done on the device itself? Probably Most. How many times will it take for data to be picked off from going back and forth from a portal before some MIS manager gets fired for allowing users to use that service. The MS haters of the world would use tin cans and string to avoid paying MS, but look at the Majority of Licensed Office users, It isnt the home consumer, Its the corporate, If you deal with a Multinational IS dept, You arent going to get a portal for documents through a Security committee, no matter how hard you try.
This is going to HURT them a LOT.
Let's not get ahead of the game. This is only if it takes off, which will be decided by the market and will sure be a slow process.
Besides, who wants to be deprived of all its documentation every time DSL is down?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Most likely. Google makes their money by providing stuff for free and making money off advertising. They make a lot of money doing it.
Back in the days of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, this practice was extremely annoying; you got half the screen filled with colour animated generic ads. Google proved that if you used targetted ads you could replace half a screen worth of ads with just one single group of text advertisements. I suspect they'll do something similar for an office suite, perhaps with the ads targetted to the content of your document.
So it's going to be good because it's non-MS? I don't see how this is going to take off when native versions of StarOffice that run on several platforms have not. Not even the free OpenOffice that will do almost all of what this does has truly harmed Redmond. This is just another stab by Sun at their "thin-client" future where they lock us in harder than Microsoft ever could except we'll need a fat client to run the browser that will be rendering this DHTML UI. Unless it's Java then we're screwed. Perhaps they're just going after the Google cool factor? I can't wait for the free Google "beta" that will lock everyone out of their documents the day they unveil the subscription model from Sun ;) Isn't this what we all feared from Microsoft's Office .NET scheme that never took off?
They'll lose here. Google gives it's products away for actually free and is tons better at running an ad-based business than MS is. MS can't use their typical predatory pricing schemes to kill google, unless they start paying people to use their software.
Of course, they can always leverage their windows monopoly to try to do kill google. Still, if everything is web-based and platform agnostic, that will be harder than it used to be. The insidious bit is that google inherently runs on their software (IE), and there's nothing they can do to stop people from going to google's site. It's not like with Netscape, and they could pay OEMs to keep Netscape off the desktop.
Imagine a web-based office application that could be used from anywhere, and also allowed you to download a platform-agnostic (likely Java) offline editor. You could access your documents anywhere, take them with you, and edit them anywhere. Key to success would be a method of integrating the offline document when you bring it back online - integrated (but transparent and seamless) version control would be critical there.
Now HERE is where the real kicker is. Google could sell this system to companies so they could run it on their own network. Think MS Exchange for documents, only functional. This would inherently integrate backups, and it would allow tons of collaboration benefits that can only be dreamed of now. This is such a no-brainer I'm legitimately surprised MS hasn't done something like it.
I think this is doable. If they pull it off, it could seriously threaten MS.
Someone already took an open source operating system and slapped a pretty GUI on it, that was Apple. But I agree, google might do the one thing Apple has left to do: be hardware independent.
I don't know about a Google OS, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google replaced all of our day-to-day software with complex AJAX sites, making us not need anything else, other than a browser and possibly a hard drive to save sensitive information. (everything else will probably be on Google's server, making it even easier to publish stuff you want to go public with)
The opportunity Google has with this, is you can have an entire workstation that is not only hardware independent, but Operating System independent as well. I can check gmail just fine in linux, windows, and MacOSX and have the same experience on all 3. Why not do something similar to that for all desktop applications?
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." -C.S. Lewis
Google could just ensure that their test team is testing major vendor's hardware like Dell, HP, etc. After all, if you're talking about business and joe user functionality, you don't need to focus on 3D acceleration and such.
Google could just sink their cash into Novell/SuSE, RedHat, or Mandriva and provide a bundle that already works. Oh, wait, that's right -- you can already get Linux bundles with Java, OO/SO, etc.
So what's the "new" aspect you're suggesting, other than Google becoming involved in the marketing and distribution? What precisely is it that we need for a desktop GUI that isn't already in KDE and/or Gnome? 3D alpha-transparency spinners? Corona effects for the "glint" off metallic 3D lettering?
What Google could really provide in this area is some funding to improve the hardware support and configuration/maintenance utilities for components like configuring 3D support, adding/removing software, etc. I'm not talking about yet another front-end for RPM or APT, but some real improvement in reducing dependencies and manageability.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yeah, except this is a _corporate blog_, and the poster is the current President and COO of Sun Microsystems. So his blog post is pretty much a PR announcement.
[mumbles]how is parent moded +5 Insighful ? Gotta metamod more frequently[/mumbles]
Are you saying that if I discovered the secret of eternal youth, then that wouldn't change the world, simply because it's not a new idea, people have been looking for it since the dawn of time?
No. The difference in your (poor) analogy is that people were searching for the secret, but did not find it, whereas you did. With respect to client-server technology, it has been done for years already. Thus, implementing an office suite over the Internet is no different than implementing it over, say, a LAN. The "secret" has already been found.
Just because it's already been thought of doesn't mean that an implementation won't potentially be interesting.
I didn't say it wasn't interesting. I said it wasn't new.
Personally, I think Google's "beta" GMail is not so much an experiment in large email, but an experiment in how in _reliably_ providing large amounts of remote space for purposes just like an web-based office suite -- so perhaps you will "officially" be able to do just as you said in the near future.
Shortly before StarDivision sold itself to Sun, they announced a server-based StarOffice product (was it StarPortal?) that may have been similar to this. Does anyone else remember it, and wonder if bandwidth and technology (AJAX?) have finally made it usable over the Internet (as opposed to just over one company's network)?
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
'"Fat client"? You need a "fat" client to run a browser? Please...'
Not forgetting, of course, that all this is based on AJAX. That is, HTML, CSS, Javascript/ECMAScript, which aren't "owned" by any one vendor. The day Google starts producing (i) the majority web-browser browser with (ii) proprietary extensions is the day we have to worry in the slightest about vendor lockin.
And the day Google habitually charges a subscription fee for any of its mainstream services (go on, name one) is also the day we can even start worrying about them becoming the next Microsoft here.
This isn't about vendor-lockin. This is about taking away Microsoft's competitive get-out-of-jail-free card, their monopoly over the majority development API (the Windows API).
Once a full-featured (hell, even half-way decent) MS Office compatible office suite doesn't need the Windows API, there's no hard requirement for most businesses to use Windows. In fact, the ease of adminning/free-ness/lack of installation requirements of a web app means there are very compelling reasons to make the switch.
The reasons Star/OpenOffice haven't taken off are:
(i) Marketing: Nobody (apart from us geeks) has really heard of them.
(ii) Trust: Very few companies have the kind of big-name-brand trust CEOs (erroneously) have for Microsoft).
(iii) Hassle of administration: There are no practical obvious admin advantages in switching from one desktop app to another.
However:
(i) Everyone and his grandma have heard of Google these days, and they could (should they wish to) likely amass a marketing budget on the same scale as Microsoft's, at least for one product launch.
(ii) Google, although a relative newcomer, is now sufficiently ubiquitous and useful that it's rapidly gaining (if it hasn't already) big-name-brand recognition.
(iii) Switching from a desktop app to a web app, however, is a no-brainer. Especially for overworked and underfunded IT departments the world over.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Exactly my thoughts. If I remember correctly, Microsoft makes much more money off Office than Windows, but they have to keep producing Windows because that helps maintain their grip on Office users. I'd wager that support costs for an OS are way higher than support costs for an app, even one as large as Office. If MS could drop their OS the company would probably be much leaner and profitable, but they can't do that or they risk losing control.
If Google was to release something, it would be smartest to release something that works on Windows, Linux and OS X. Let the support for the OS, where the biggest headaches come from, to someone else. That makes the most business sense to me.
As part of the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in downloads of the Java Runtime Environment from Java.com,
mkay great, but why is this newsworthy?This would not be a game that Microsoft would want to play since they could spend a ton of effort only to see their hole patched without anybody even noticing. Not to mention that since Google relies on widely used features that are support by many browsers, breaking a Google web app will likely break many other web apps. The providers of these other apps probably don't have the resources to patch IE problems as quickly as Google does. So that could be another dangerous risk to take, suddenly giving IE a reputation of breaking lots of random websites every time you do a Windows Update. Those same sites will probably work just fine in Firefox or Opera and the providers of those apps will suddenly have a very good reason to advertise this fact!