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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...
"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.
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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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 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?
Yeah!! And what if in their secret underground labs they're working on a new hypermatter engine that could transport children and chia pets to distant stars in seconds??? I mean, they're partnering with and draining away talent from NASA, and they have like a kajillion dollars, so they could do it!!!
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.
The browser is a crappy application platform. All the remote access methods (MS DHTML download behavior, hidden frames, XmlHttpRequest) are severly limited in functionality, especially error recovery and detection. Raise your hand if you've ever had sending an email in gmail screw up? The UI design decisions a browser makes to optimize the browsing of hypertext are totally different than the ones you make when you're create an application, especially an office suite. Web applications have a couple notable benefits, combined with some signifigant flaws. The major advantages are remote access and ease of installation/support. Disadvantages include, but are not limited to, more difficult cross platform development (yes, really: it's harder to get complicated DHTML behaviors working in multiple browsers than a regular application, and it's complicated by being hard to reliably detect your platform), lack of local file access, limited UI customization possible (have to roll your own drag & drop, limited context menu support), no integration into the desktop (standard menu shortcuts hit the browser, not the application), and a limited widget set to work from.
Theres a good reason why people moved away from thin clients. People are slowly moving back, for a variety of reasons, and there *are* good reasons to do it, but until someone (Microsoft in Vista?) develops a standard and widely deployed remote application host, which is *not* a web browser, AJAX and web applications are going to remain underdeveloped and overhyped. Look to Java Web Start for inspiration (if only Java apps weren't so crappy...)
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.