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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."
[X] Google Earth
[X] Google Moon
[X] Google Sun
Looks like we live in a google universe.
liqbase
I don't mean to blog, but I totally blogged this yesterblog. Take that, blogosphere!
For more information, click here.
I live in another hemisphere and i can hear the guys at Microsoft developing an ulcer!
Seriously, if this is true, things are going to get pretty interesting...
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.
Got Code?
"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.
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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Javascript AJAX? Or is this Google's push of Java to the desktop?
An online office suite? This is going to be bigger than Microsoft Bob!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
I imagine a great deal of furniture is gonna be abused today.
Got Code?
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.
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.
I'm feeling a terrible disruption in the force --- it is as if a million chairs just got thrown out a window.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
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.
Sun have had this technology for 5 years...it was called StarPortal, and then Sun One Web Top as Sun's marketing people renamed it to their latest buzzword compliant version. I bet the new version will be something like 'JWS' - Java Web System.
It is essentially a Java encapsulation of Star/Open Office accessible through a browser. Pretty cool stuff, but involved some hefty Java downloads (~100MB?) to get it started up. Once started up though, it was almost identical to using a native version of Star/Open Office.
Marty
Let's put "critical software for airports" on a remote server so airport employees can work from home! I can't see any problems with that idea at all!
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.
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?
MS won't do the extra effort to brake their OS more on SUN h/w then on the others.
To be fair though, Microsoft don't seem to have to put any particular effort into making their OS break, it just kinda happens.
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!
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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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.
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?
my pet machine
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!
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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?
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.
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.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
'"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
Meh.. All that conjecture and just another corporate alliance. http://www.sun.com/2005-1004/feature/index.html Wake me up when Steve Jobs et al, join the mega-collective also.. G~
I was a little late to the webcast, but the gist is that Google and Sun are in the beginning stages of forming a partnership that begins with something about Java integration in the Google Toolbar (didn't catch all of that) and Google buying a lot of Sun servers. Whatever.
In the Q&A session, Eric Schmidt says that they will *assist* in the distribution of OpenOffice (whatever that menas), but that they are *not* announcing a new product (i.e., Google Office).
I think that the blog community got way, way ahead of this story.
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!