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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."
Now if you really want to take a real bite out of MS then put a link to
it right on the front of the google home page.
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open Micro$oft Word and Powerpoint files ? And can it handle my 100 slide powerpoint file with zillions of pictures ? Will it handle complicated tables made by someone else in MS Office ? If not, why should I try this ? And is there any reason to believe that it will have more features than a full Staroffice installed on the desktop itself ?
In terms of things like clarity, ease of use, responsiveness, an office suite is probably the most anathemical thing to AJAX you could name. If they can write an office suite in AJAX, they can do anything in AJAX.
This assumes the web office is written in AJAX and not Java. If it's written in Java, expect trouble. I used Corel Wordperfect for Java, man. It wasn't a usable tool.
Also, to be quite frank, they're going to have to put some very serious interface cleanup work into this. StarOffice is really just not up to the level of quality in terms of user interface which Google's tools tend to follow.
Incidentally, is it just me or does it seem odd that they're targeting Word BEFORE Exchange?
I bet these guys feel stupid now ;)
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I think I've heard of this idea before (putting office applications onto web) but it never took off back then probably because the speed of browsers/internet couldn't provide the quality most people wanted.
The idea is good though, imagine being able to sit at home, work or school working on the same documents at the same loctaion without having to worry about usb drives and moving datas.
I think I would be careful about storing sensitive or private data onto it as I really see this becoming a prime target for crackers.
Javascript AJAX? Or is this Google's push of Java to the desktop?
My question is how compatible will this software be with certain file formats? Will we be able to open or Word/Excel documents on this web office? And will it work across OS's..
I can only imagine how Gates is feeling..
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Indeed it is a bad day at Redmond. However, let's be cautious. Google does have a knack for producing damned good products but this represents a new paradigm in how people use computers. It will be a daunting task to convince people to change. Expect a torrential outpouring of FUD from Microsoft and others as they try and keep their grip on selling software in the 'traditional' way.
It seems to me that Google's brand recognition will be a hugem benefit in this endeavour, and I, for one, look forward to seeing how well it is adopted. My fingers are crossed that it might be a success. I am very interested to see how such a service will be embraced by the public.
One thing that makes many desktop aplications so productive is the use of keyboard shortcuts. That's one thing that web pages are lacking. Yeah, gMail has some minimal shortcuts, but web applications don't act the same way as desktop applications. It'd be great if there were a browser plug-in that user-approved web pages could interface with so that keyboard shorts would work with web-based server-side applications...like the new gOffice.
Hmmm...where that leavs their support for OpenOffice?
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Now, before this time we had never considered the concept, but once we did, it really opened doors for possibilities. I remember thinking to myself it is only a matter of time before more people start doing this. And now, a few years later, here we are with Google and Sun claiming they will change the world with this. The are a little late in books, and not far enough into the project to claim the world will change. Nevertheless, it will be cool to see it done (if it works well).
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Oh, I did I mention that all your data will belong to Microsoft?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Actually, though, the concept of versions becomes a little irrelevant, don't you think? I suspect they'll launch a version 1 as soon as they possibly can. The marketing types will hype up a version 2 and version 3, but the engineers will know better. They'll be able to incrementally update their software every day, if they so choose. Zillions of little changes will evolve this suite into something special.
As for MS Office compatibility... I assume that they will one day give users the ability to upload a .doc file and have it render well in their web office. This might be in version 1, because it is pretty damned important.
The world is changing alright. Schwartz's comment might be full of hubris, but he's right (though he might not be able to honestly take credit). Interactive web applications and ever increasing broadband will ultimately trump the desktop. If you don't believe this, then you don't appreciate deploying a webapp versus local installations.
I will be able to install this office suite by typing in a URL and hit ctrl-enter. When they update the software to version 2, 3, 4, and 5, I'll have each one instantly.
The desktop is (ultimately) doomed. It'll take a while, but webapps are the way to go for a large percentage of needs. Even Bill Gates knows this.
Now my office application experience can be just like the rest of my web experience -- slow, poorly designed, and ad-ridden! Yay!
Although I guess in fairness, MS Office has the first two items covered already.
till the security department finds out you have been uploading and composing confidential business documents to a third party advertising based company who reads the entire content, then links it to your profile to taget commericial pitches based on the content of your documents
you should get your coat and start clearing out your desk now
because if i ever found a memeber of staff using a service like this they would be out the door pretty rapid
keeping a hang on USB drives and laptops is enough headache as it is without stafdf members giving away our company documents to other businesses
Java's been a huge investment for Sun. Yet, not as profitable as they would like (considering it's ubiquity). Assuming that this client uses ads, and Java (it would make sence). They may finally earn a little back at the cost of the time taken to build the new office suite.
That being said, that wouldn't be the best strategy available from a monitary perspective. In this case, java would be considered a sunk cost. And I can't see any PHB's, even at sun, thinking otherwise.
So, the strategy is probably focused on promoting Operating System agnostism. And, if sun is lucky, get attention and prove (to the average person, not programmers and admins) that they are relevant. Hence, the potential for long term gain. In this case, breaking even on the investment is well worth it.
I don't think this is a game that Microsoft wants to play because no matter what the outcome they have to lose, with the exceptional case of this not catching on. But if google promotes it, at the very least, free office software should get attention no matter what.
This is just my 2 cents, but with exchange rates I think it only amounts to 1.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Why the hell would I want to surf to my word processor?
I can download one for free, if I wish, and it does not have advertising.
It starts faster, and will probably do more.
It does not require an internet connection to work.
It does not broadcast any document I work on over the Internet.
Granted, some of these are speculation on how the new suite would work, but it's speculation based on similar existing apps.
The most useful thing I can think of would to be able to download a copy to a local machine, which equates to some damn easy deployment of software.
~D
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According to what? An unofficial blog with 2 lines in it? What the hell are you talking about?
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So Google/Sun offer an online office application, which will be fine for single users, then some companies want to use it. Next Google will sell something like the Google mini (see this piece on AnandTech loaded with the online office application server in a mini version... ...and then we're back full circle at server/client applications, thin clients, the complete shebang. But this time all that in a closed box, with an external support thing too. Oh, we had that before already too? A wet dream for the Sun guys, for sure.
My first thought is that it's just a strategic move to show MS they're ready for battle. It's now up to MS to decide if they continue the battle or retreat.
Googles main business is searching.. and that's what they make their profit.
MS otoh makes a large part of their profit from the Office suite.
So MS got more interested in the search engine business.. Google doesn't like it and wants to fight back.. so they now pick their battle field.
Not the searching business as they've got too much too loose, but the office business. Google doesn't have a lot to loose there but MS does.
Things like these happened in the past.. if a competitor from another business comes into your business, you see where you can hurt him the most and attack him in this business..
Shift the focus, make clear to him he's got more to loose than you, and hope he'll retreat and you can focus on your core business.
So either an office suite war will start.. or MS will slow down on the area of searching and let Google have that part of the market.
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The plug-in market for this will be interesting. I can edit documents on the web; But what if I can compile code on the web? And colaborate with other on my C++ / C / Embedded ARM project? No need for me to install some god-awfull toolchain; It's there on the web. I edit, hit compile, and back comes my image. Latest version? There when I'm ready. Cost? Free if I dont mind some carefully targeted ads.
Security, or more to the point trust, is my only issue now.
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OK OK I know you're not ready for it all yet, I just VERY glad that a HUGE PUBLIC will have the experience of working on OpenOffice like WebOffice Suite THUS making it easier to accelerate the pace of desktop migrations to Linux, for instance...
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
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".
I heard Scott McNealy speak last summer and he was totally gung ho about this exact idea, in nearly those exact words. Except what did he call it, um, "Utility computing". The theory is that upkeep on your computers should be something as impersonal and effortless as paying your electricity bill, and should be managed the same way, you should take one step beyond outsourcing your IT department into outsourcing the insides of the computers themselves. Because if you don't have anything running locally, you don't need a local IT department, right? This wasn't even about thin clients, so much; by McNealy's reckoning, you could do this today, nearly. He was talking about how he wished he could shut down Sun's internal mail servers, stop having to go to the bother of maintaining all the email clients and such across all the operating systems Sun internally supports, and just sign all his employees up for Yahoo Mail or something.
The reason Sun likes the idea of all software being reduced to a service provided by remote application providers is because once that happens, they can try to sell Sun hardware to the application providers.
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This just confirms what all the anti-antitrust law people have been saying all along. If a company (like Microsoft) really has a monopoly and is exploiting to make lucrative returns, someone will enter and compete with them. And yes, that was a bold claim. 10 years ago, no one would have believed that anyone could go head to head with Microsoft on their office suite. In other words, no one predicted Google.
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Well, you could say that Microsoft is Googles (And Suns to some extent) primary competitor. And Microsoft fuels their operation against Google with profits from MS Office (among other sources). If Google manages to attack and harm those sources of cash, they will harm MS's capability to compete with Google.
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I think half the world only need a basic word processor and spreadsheet. I am not sure why my employer paid and installed an expensive suite on my desktop when what I really need is wordpad or something similiar. I am sure web office, if they can proivide basic editing , thesaurus , dictionary and a spreadhseet etc will be really helpful for the people who cannot afford expensive office suits.
IT admins everywhere with a few shiny new "Google 2U OS" boxes on the network serving up core desktop office apps to the entire office of several thousand people will surely be jumping for joy in 5-10 years. No more hell-desk, no more Windows reimaging that takes hours, far fewer virii to deal with in the workplace. We will welcome our Google overlords with open arms... until they make so much money and have so much political clout that they begin bending government to their own will. And then, like the thousands of years of history before us, we will rebel and proclaim that we never saw it coming, they're evil, they're the bane of the technology industry, etc.
Let's just keep it in perspective. Open Source is the big revolution, and what is working wonders in the technology world today - not Google. Google is a company, and right now Google knows exactly how to serve and please its customers. Let's hope they continue that trend, but everyone fails eventually -- even a mega-billion dollar company.
Thinking about it, I can see this doing quite well with home users - people who want to write the odd letter or short report. Microsoft Works users, rather than Office users. I can't imagine anyone doing anything serious with it, unless Google makes an Office Appliance for companies.
One good thing that should come out of this is improved MS Office integration for Openoffice - users are going to want to import/export Office docs to send to other people and the kind of massive user base and testing Google can provide should help to catch all those annoying minor import problems with OO.org.
this is going to take a lot of bandwidth to be at all usable.
Maybe this is why Google was buying up all that unused fiber?
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What if, behind closed doors at Google they're working on an OS? An OS that's based on Linux, yet with the UI and ease-of-use similar to OSX. And on x86 machines it will be able to run Windows software. And then they make the whole thing all open source.
Google has the resources to pull this off. Sure, they're draining talent away from Microsoft to come work for them...why not do the same to Apple? Make a kick-ass UI, have it run on top of Linux...hell, you could even make your own API instead of using X-windows if you really wanted to. Start from scratch, why not? They have the money, the time, the personnel. Write the drivers for the hardware yourselves.
I mean, come on. They have all that talent working there now and quite frankly, they've only come out with "neato" little things here and there. Yes, great search engine. But take all that talent and make something really cool! Something revolutionary!
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This has been talked about for a long time now -
I think it was IBM that first championed the cause of having applications that were provisioned only for selected users who paid for it. This was like in the 80s and early 90s. The more you paid, the more applications were available on the mainframe, for your user id. I am not sure about the details since never worked in this field.
Then, Microsoft came along and cornered IBM's market. They cornered the market by making people realize that owning your software actually means having it on a disk, taking it wherever you want, etc. After they cornered the entire market, they started talking about Web Services - about Office being run on the web. This is like Steve Balmer's dream.
Now Google comes along and actually moves forward in that direction, but interestingly, they have most people on their side. Will Google become the next Microsoft?
If the data is accessible in a standard format (it seems likely that this will save into OpenDocument, and GMail can be accessed through POP3), the underlying database is unimportant. I can see the problem with GMail, since its labels don't map onto a currently-standard protocol, though.
As for releasing source, Google's business model is based upon advertising, so it's not in their interest to release the source that would allow people to quickly create identical competitors. They spent the time and money on the development, it's theirs to apply their business model to. This does not make them evil. Not by a long way. They're conducting their business and systems in such a way that people can obtain their services for free, and that they can make a profit.
They have not acted in a way remotely resembling "evil" in this matter. They're not sucking your freedom — your data is accessible through open protocols. They're not sucking your privacy — your data is analysed by a computer system to provide targetted advertising. As much as spam filters are "stealing my privacy", I'm not convinced it's a serious issue.
actually a freind and i have found that google's advertising does not put out ads even at the hint of something negative. try sticking something like "death, funeral, terror" in your gmail sig, and they dont even display ads. it's one of google's courteousy things incase your email is about the death of someone and you're traumatized or something. I dont know if it still works that way, but i know it used to in gmail's early days.. what about spandex and proctologists? one may never know...
Remember how ebay got nailed for ads asking if you want to buy a slave because the word slave appeared on a page, and google got into the act too: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/24/ebay_afric an_slaves/
So you'll see ads having to do with a combination of glue, panties, and bikes in France or some other such shit.This hurts Microsoft right where they can be hurt the most. It's worth noting that their other divisions don't make near the amount of money that Office does; and it could be argued that as Office goes, so goes the OS. If you can access an office suite from any browser, would you care as much what OS you use, be it Win, Linux, OS X, or a Google OS?
Here's some reaction to this, in no specific order:
This could really be online services done right, and if anybody would do them right it'd be Google: they have the server infrastructure to support this kind of move, and few other companies do, including Microsoft. We might remember this announcement as the day the PC died in 5 years--that might be pretty forward thinking, but if this works out as well as it reasonably might, do you need more than a browser platform for average computing tasks? Particularly when your email, browser, and office docs are unified by the great need to search that body of information by the best search engine yet designed?
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I hear all this talk of Google making an OS. I think what Google has realized is that desktop users really don't care. Their OS is a web browser. Sun more or less declared this to be so when they started working on Java. Sun did it from the bottom up, starting with a programming language and portable virtual machine. Google did it from the top down, writing interesting applications to meet demand. So far Google's approach has worked a lot better than Sun's. I guess we'll find out if the market is ready for this kind of convergence.
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If they have ads in your document, maybe they'll be links to Google Scholar searches, rather than products? I find it hard to believe that writing a document would make you want to buy products. Writing documents is a very solitary and "holy" task for most people, I think.
A Web-based office app is not your basic HTML site...it's going to bend the browser as far as it can to accomplish what it wants, just like GMail and Google Maps do. Unfortunately by doing this, Google exposes their product to the whims of Microsoft, who is in the process of redesigning their browser already.
If the app is like Gmail but even more complicated (which seems likely), even small changes to the browser features this app depends on (some of which are not standardized and were originally introduced by Microsoft) will have massive effects on the app's performance. And Microsoft could easily make such tweaks ad infinitum by way of "security updates" that close security holes by continuously re-tweaking the advanced features of IE.
Most users won't download a whole new browser just to try out a new Google feature. They might not even realize they have to...when a site doesn't work right most users assume it's the site's fault, not the browser's.
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Seems like the idea is that when users download google toolbar they will also get the JRE. This is a platform strategy, plain and simple. You can't have a google 'platform' unless folks download and install one first, and Java is a natural choice since it is mature and established.
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