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Google Declares War on Microsoft
hajmola writes "According to an article in The Inquirer, 'Google has confirmed that it will launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online and take on Microsoft in one of its biggest markets. Under the deal, Google will allow web users to access Sun's OpenOffice from a toolbar.'" This is full confirmation of a story from Tuesday. Forbes thinks this isn't anything to write home about, while InfoWorld disagrees.
Does anyone know of any previous cases where companies have taken fairly successful desktop applications and made them accessible on the web?
I've read through all the linked articles, and the articles *they* link to, and while the claims of "Google confirms it!" are plentiful, I haven't seen a single named source or attribution for this story.The Forbes story, in fact, still calls any Google online office venture 'speculation'. Where is this 'declaration of war'?
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
Excuse me. StarOffice is Sun's. OpenOffice is ours.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Where do I enlist...
(This is one war I think protesters will be null)
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
How does this help me when I have no network connectivity?
All the power to them if they suck some marketshare from Office. But there is one thing about the direction that all this is taking that bothers me.
TFA says it's not the value of the software but rather the service and content that matters. I'd tend to agree with that statement. But a little part of me can't help but dislike and be paranoid about all these web services. Do you really want the future of web processing to be entirely web based and saved on somebody else's machine? G-mail bothers me like that -- even though I pretty much use it exclusively for e-mail now.
I'm not a big fan of making all the desktops in the World into dumb terminals -- even if that means some measure of freedom from Microsoft.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
With all the nifty cool features of Office 12, I was wondering what OpenOffice was going to do to even it up. Let's face it: OpenOffice is pretty much tracking Office 2000. That's not really that bad. I can get all my work done with OpenOffice no problem. This web front end is a killer feature, especially as the new OpenOffice file format becomes more popular.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
1. Customers win as there are better cheaper choices
2. Google wins because well just because they are google
3. Microsoft because they can now say they have competition
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Why doesn't Google partner with Sun to release the product in the retail and OEM markets? If you could buy a PC with their office suite pre-installed, it would help them both and send MS into a tizzy. I, for one, am not interested in doing my word processing over the web.
Having your documents online is more conveniant and more secure. You wouldn't have to pass them around to all the different PC's you use. It is more secure because most at home users computers are riddled with virus's and spyware. A good online office solution is why Google's stock price is so high. They may or may not get there but if anyone has the tools and business culture to do it would be Google. To accomplish a good online Office Suite one would have to play well with others in the standards department and be willing to give some control away. Neither of which Microsoft is capable of doing.
What exactly does from a toolbar mean?
Is it a web app?
Where does it run from?
-- You're too stupid to be an atheist.
Googe has beaten Microsoft to the "software as a service" model. Bill has been talking about how "you have to offer software as a service" for a while now... It's ironic that someone else beat em.
bash: rtfm: command not found
A few years ago, the world's leading computer company almost went under because it didn't understand the paradigm shift that had happened.
Because IBM didn't understand the value of the desktop to the user, and Microsoft did, IBM lost big time. Only by totally reinventing themselves as a service provider FIRST and a computer company second did IBM survive.
Today, Sun and Google understand the value of the internet to the user, and Microsoft doesn't. They never have. That's why to this day, despite numerous losses and being forced to bow to consummer demands, MS thinks "embracing and extending" open network protocol standards is a good thing. Microsoft can not survive a market place they don't understand. No business can.
You either make money, or eventually you fail, that's the reality of business. In a world where computer software production is becomming more and more commodity production, MS doesn't know how to survive. Sun and Google do. So, Bill, meet Sam Palmisano, he can teach you a bit about what you will need to do after the bankrupcy . . .
Cool! Now I can delete the 1GB of files needed to operate Office XP!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Well, most big companies don't sign partnership agreements for the purposes of just looking cool. Google doesn't run Solaris (they use Linux), nor do they use Sun servers (they use cheap white boxes). So, why else would they "partner" with Sun? Google isn't going to swap our the OS on 1000's of servers even if Solaris was FREE, nor are they going to switch hardware. SO...what else does Sun have to offer, StarOffice which competes with MS-Office. It's been pretty obvious Google is targeting MS, since they hired away the guy (Dr. Lee) who was helping MS develop thier strategy for the worlds biggest market (China) until he fell into disfavor with Bill and/or Steve.
But really using apps over the network is NOT I repeat NOT new. When I started in software in the early 1980s all we had were cheap green-screen Televideo 9600 buad terminals hardwired to a mainframe (or VAX in some cases) server. All the applications ran on the server. This is just an "upgrade" to 1980s technology, with a nicer user interface. I'm not impressed with the idea, but I am glad someone is after MS. INMHO, competition is good and produces better products for less.
has there been any legitimate hint that they are going to combine to offer spreadsheet/word processing via the web or is all of this just speculation?
.doc/.xls formats, but AJAX is completely different from a normal application GUI.
Not only is it just speculation, it's just speculation from stupid people.
There's no way in hell Google or anyone else is gonna make an AJAX-based front-end to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org; that's a retarded idea. Google could build their own AJAX-based word processor and spreadsheet, and maybe license some of the code for importing/exporting
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
Ignoring the fact that this seems like more speculation (already well discussed with less then 10 comments), how exactly is this a threat to Microsoft and its Office family? Microsoft's main customer for it's 500$+ office suite is not home users, but businesses. Taking away some home users (half of whom where likely running pirated copies) is like a drop in the barrel.
For a business, dropping out $500 isn't much, especially when compared to wages (this is something OSS needs to understand when they try and convince businesses they're cheaper - the initial cost is meaningless, they want figures on the support cost). On the other hand, having your critical work depend on a network connection to some internet server is quite a huge risk (especially if you can't call up that internet server and demand instant human support for any little problem). And that's before you figure in the fact that Google's whole business model is personal information data mining. Even if Google is going to give their song and dance that they won't use it for evil, most companies aren't going to let a 3rd party store their documents, let alone run an automated program over every document they have mining out key information. As has been shown in the past "Google Hacking" is often used to get to information you weren't supposed to see. Can you imagine "Google Hacking" used for corporate espionage? A company wants to know if their competitor is looking into sprockets. So they take out an "ad" on Google specifically targeted at that keyword, but with completely different ad text. They then record IPs from incoming clicks to gauge if that ad was shown to people in the target company a lot, indicating that Google had mined that phrase from many of their documents and emails (gmail). And that's before you consider the fact that Google becomes a serious hacking target (even to hostile foreign governments), since a breach would affect tens of thousands of companies. With so many eggs in one basket it might be enough to warrent a physical breakin, stealing the data of thousands of companies, which are then sold to competitors or held for blackmail.
What are the details?
What's it going to be
1) Google directs you to the staroffice website for you to download &
install it locally on your machine & google provides a place for you to
store your documents
OR
2) Google & Sun rebuild StarOffice as a Webservice & then allow you
to edit your document through a webapp & also proves a place for
you to store your documents
Model 1 -> In my opinion, doesn't provide anything new. You
can do it now. Still doesn't solve the problem of people being
locked to Microsoft's format.
Model 2 -> May be good - may solve the problem of people being bound to
the Microsoft document format (i.e. the format isn't important if you have
a service, which is always accessible to everyone to open/edit/print it,
but there is one problem.
50% of the time, documents are edited offline. It's going to be some
years, before people are online all the time. Even when that happens,
what happens if your service goes down & you need to edit the document
coz you have a presentation in 15 minutes.
Plus can a webbased service really provide all the functionality & speed of
a native application?
This is yet another milestone in Google's quest to achieve access to all of our personal information.
I bet they'll be crawling all the documents you type, all the data you input, cross refer that with all your mail from your GMail account/Online searches/Google-Maps activity/Google Talk conversations/ISP traffic where Google-Wifi is available, etc.
It seems we're all waiting for it to become "too late" before we realize what's been going on.
Google can do far greater damage then Microsoft ever could.
Soon enough, Google would turn out to be our worst privacy intrusion nightmare.
Wake up people!
Sigs are for the weak.
Can someone explain to me how you access a thick client application from a browser toolbar?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
I certainly hope so! I have enjoyed using OO.o and hope to see continued development on that project. I would like to see the project focus more on the speed of execution and loading. It's a bit slow even if it is worth the wait. Admittedly MS Office "cheats" by preloading components into the operating system, but then so should OO.o. Under Windows, I understand that OO.o already does some preloading, but I'm a Linux user primarily and only use Win+OO.o when I have to move data from Linux to Windows.
Or perhaps the problem I am describing has already been managed and I just haven't caught on -- this wouldn't be the first time. So if anyone could offer answers, I'm listening. I use FC4 and keep it as "stock" as possible by using only updates from the main channels. (I have broken my own rules, recently by subscribing myself to the nr-production channels to gain access to Gnome 2.12 as I have found it to be VASTLY faster and VASTLY more stable than 2.10 or whatever FC4 normally uses.)
Anyway... I digress... I hope Google will participate, then, in the development of OO.o and perhaps even in the Linux Desktop movement!
It's about time. I wanna see those Google tanks take on the Microsoft cyborgs with all the cluster bombing and the killing and Redmond getting nuked and I wouldn't wanna fuck around with Steve Ballmer, I can just imagine him in a torn shirt and a bandana armed with a minigun and stabbing the wounded with his bayonet and Bill Gates wired into some massive battle computer and Steve Jobs just biding his time waiting for them to destroy each other so he can piss on the ashes.......... Man, this is some good coffee!!!
The day I may use Linux as freely as I am forced to use Windows to play my games, do my work, etc... is coming closer. If Google can make a concerted push to use OpenOffice then the document exchange I need done on a regular basis will be easy between Linux and Windows users.
:)
Now if only Linux was as EASY to use as Windows, and we are there. I'm thinking something Mac OSX-esque for Linux -- Google has the means to deliver it. They don't need to release their own distro of Linux, but they can release a KDE/GNOME competitor that makes using Linux a BREEZE.
I'm just waiting for the day
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Yes, MS has some strong arming advantages in their tactics to protect themselves from Google, but they've already been limited by the government, people are becoming frustrated with MSFT's stock performance over the past five years, and CNBC has been pointing out threats like Linux and the world is taking it seriously.
So, in addition to software quality, Google's war will be helped greatly by their brand, imo.
It finally starts. The general public might finally understand that there is an alterative to MS.
Two years ago I introduced firefox to a friend who I thought was tech savvy but I was amazed by her reaction, "You're telling me we have a choice of what browser we want to use?" Needless to say I was floored. Non geeks know who Sun is but everybody including Joe "I don't need no dang computer" Sixpack knows who Google is.
Let's forget for a moment that this is Sun's Star Office and not Open Office, and it's Google and web-based.
This maybe the moment when the general public finally realizes that they have a choice what software to run. This can only be good for OSS if marketed/reported in the right way.
Let's not get over zealous bashing M$ and say screaming about Linux, OpenOffice, Gimp & NVU...baby steps...our time will come.
And remember...do no evil!
Google isn't declaring "war" on Microsoft. That isn't their way. I know several people who work at Google, and they just don't talk about "killing" companies the way Microsoft employees do. It truly is a different work culture there. If someone does use "the K word" at an all-hands meeting or something, the bosses are quick to say that they don't want the employees to think about things that way.
Google can be a resoundingly successful company even if Microsoft is alive and well, and they're fine with that. The only thing Google needs from Microsoft is for them not to put up artificial barriers to accessing Google's services, such as modifying IE in ways that hamper Google. So I'm sure Google would love to see everyone using a non-MS browser such as Firefox.
I really think Google's strategy is (or should be) to lift the key services and applications from the OS up into well-made web services. Word processing is a huge one for most of us. I'm still anxiously hoping that a calendar and scheduler (Outlook-type program) comes along soon to integrate with Gmail. Once Google fills those needs, assuming they do it well, I'll really enjoy having consistent services that I can use from anywhere, on any platform.
GMail.
-Sun will promote Google Toolbar
-Google will promote Java runtime and stuff
Nowhere does it say that there will be a in-browser version on OpenOffice. It's speculation. If you disagree, link me a press release and quote it.
-everphilski-
And why is this a big deal? Well sure people could use openoffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office, but people not familiar with opensource software often aren't comfortable with installing it on their harddrive. They think openoffice == shareware. So go and make it availaable on the internet through a google toolbar, you add a whole new level of credibility to the product that "average Joes" will be comfortable with. And we all know the "average Joe" market is the market to win these days. Microsoft has not had any strong competition for their office suite in a decade, so this should prove interesting on the software front.
Apparently Google is in possession of documents claiming Microsoft is in possession of Weapons of Mass Distribution.
In related news, it has been reported that Clippy was an early casualty - he took a direct hit from a sniper in the semi-colon. At the end, he simply wiggled his eyes, straightened, and flew away.
Some settling may occur during posting.
I think you may be missing another part of the value equation. Previously, people had to buy:
1) A Java runtime ($0)
2) The Google Toolbar ($0)
3) OpenOffice.org. ($0)
This cost users a prohibitively high price (3 times $0!) Now, thanks to these revolutionary decisions by Sun and Google, you only have to pay $0 once. One enormous $0 download. What a deal! A third the price for all the functionality.
By putting randomly a "brought to you by google ©" picture as a 10% black backplane through all the documents. At least 5 time per page.
The partnership could mark a shift away from the traditional method of distributing software through the Microsoft Windows system and bring greater visibility to such Java-based programs as OpenOffice.org.
You'll find the above paragraph is CNN's speculation on the press release, not part of the press release itself.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That doesn't mean Google will launch an online/web-enabled write/spreadsheet application. That could be something as miniscule as linking to OpenOffice.org from the GoogleToolbar to "download" the application. Google has not confirmed the development of a web-enabled word processor. Everyone has simply drawn that conclusion based upon speculation.
I want something official or nothing at all.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
There was a time when contact management (or, in a more sophisticated form, CRM - customer relationship management) was a desktop app like Act or similar products. Enter SalesForce.com. You could say the same thing about what used to be the province of QuickBooks Pro, or lighter-weight implementations of accounting apps like Solomon or Great Plains, and look instead at NetLedger.com. These are complete migrations from desktop business apps to subscription-based web apps. Likewise with newer versions of tax prep software, etc. This is not new.
That being said, I don't want to have to be internet-connected in order to work on a word processor document.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
With an online spreadsheet and word processor, I won't have to jack around with my flash drive all the time between school, work and home. I can create a document online and save it there; forward it to whomever I need to; and access it whenever without the need for my flash drive intermediary. Big news for me and the other kajillion students out there. I used to shuttle stuff around via email and even a web site I had before. This eliminates machinations like that too.
Also, the city of Houston and state of Indiana both set up a similar system called SimDesk a few years ago.
File -> new document -> templates -> report -> I'm feeling Lucky!
It will only matters if they can make an open, standard doc format common for all users. They're just like any other office app competitor to Microsoft, even if their app is better and easier to "install". The doc format lockin is the MS ace in the hole.
.doc and .xls form. I know that they're the endpoints of any web link graph, when the user agent can't parse their MS formatted links to other docs. But so is .pdf, and we get a lot more of those results. While Acrobat is designed for Web use more than is Word (native format), there's simply so much more Word and Excel activity that I'd expect more Office doc results than the tiny amount I do see. So I suspect that Google isn't any better at parsing Office formats than is anyone else. Which bodes poorly for any Google advantage in migrating the world's Office format users to an open one (or to any one). They might have an advantage in money and smarts, but I don't see signs that they've already got experience in pulling off this epochal feat. Maybe that's why they've partnered with Sun on Ajaxing OpenOffice, but Sun hasn't proven able to slay that dragon, either.
I'm always surprised when I Google that I don't get a lot more results in
I wish them luck, but I don't have any serious expectations. It looks like they've identified the critical "world changing" market need, but no signs other than announcing a policy to exploit it that they can pull it off. That road is already littered with dried bones.
--
make install -not war
Inquirer's article is so grossly irresponsible, and the summary so inaccurate, that I think this should just be removed
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Why? OOo from a toolbar means a bloated install for the end user and does not match the spirit of other web-based ajax offerings. Ooo is 1990's technology and paradigm. I would have expected Google to be more forward thinking and develop something similar to writely, a true web-based (thin and light) collaborative writing tool.
Search for Kiko, Num Sum and Writely to get an idea of a web-based office.
Thinkfree office has exactly the same service (a MS compatible office program available online, with document saving on their server for free)..
http://www.thinkfree.org/
But I imagine Google/Sun will get more publicity.
Microsoft didn't win by being the best, they "won" by being the cheapest that works.
Word wasn't "better" than WordPerfect (if you are running a transcription service or something similar, people have the FASTEST results with WP 5.1 than ANY modern system), and Excel wasn't "better" than Lotus 1-2-3. However, they were less than half the price and you could get the bundle for less than either program individually.
Sure, business travelers will have no interest in virtual open office... at least for the forseeable future, but home users MIGHT. My wife uses web mail (Gmail), because she can check it at the office AND at home. If she works on a personal document, she emails it to herself. A virtual (GOffice) would work for her.
Sure, those of us that work on laptops on flights would have no interest, but that doesn't matter.
If Google grabs the bottom 50% of the market, than Microsoft is in trouble... they can't sell companies on paying $100/machine to OEM office if the competition eats their lunch because home users use Goffice and business users get site licenses.
Remember why software often is winner-take-all. The costs are 99% R&D, and 1% Variable, therefore, the contribution margin on each sale is close to 99% of price. If Microsoft loses 10% of Office, that could reduce their "profits" by 20%, 30%, or more... If they need 30% of the market to cover their R&D costs, and they hold 70%, than a 10% loss in marketshare loses 25% of their profits...
Google just needs to eat them from the bottom, and Microsoft is in trouble.
Microsoft's business REQUIRES being "good enough" for 70%-90% of the markets that they play in. The smaller market remaining forces their competition higher and higher up the chain.
Apple's OS R&D isn't going to be THAT MUCH smaller than Microsoft's, which forces Apple's prices to be higher (compare Apple's margins on hardware to Microsoft's OEM deals... for fairness, backout the gross margin that other manufacturers make, probably 10%, and you see Apple's OS "premium" which is 8x-10x Microsoft's OEM price)...
MS SQL Server forced Oracle and DB2 out of the low end of the market, which keeps them in the premium spot despite better tech, because MS SQL is "good enough" and therefore a price drop doesn't grab marketshare for the better players.
This is why Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL and other Open Source solutions scare Microsoft... Microsoft can't sell a lot of web servers (compared to their marketshare in desktops or Office Suites), because LAMP is "good enough," which has REALLY hurt them... in that they thought they could leverage the Win95 monopoly into a server monopoly, which they never obtained.
Alex
http://online.thinkfree.com.nyud.net:8090/ (Coralized)
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:9hxx796XGNMJ: online.thinkfree.com/+&hl=en (Google's cache)
http://online.thinkfree.com/ (Spare them please!)
When Microsoft signed the deal with Sun, they never realized that Google might want to use that against them. They can now use Sun software as a service via Google, and infringe on any of Microsoft's Office patents, without the threat of a lawsuit. OpenOffice does not have this ability. Microsoft WOULD sue Openoffice.org if it became very popular. Under the agreement, there is no limit to the way Sun could distribute the application/service.
Go Google!
Completely obvious, but it seems to me that the target market for office software would be the corporate world. The problem I see with Google's idea is that it runs on the web, no? I can tell you right now that the publicly traded company I work for would never switch to Google's online office software because of the security risk associated with us putting our closely held financials online with the potential of them getting stolen. Even if the software had never been broken, or if it ran on Java with no connection to the net once it were running, the folks that make the decisions around here would still perceive it to be a huge security risk and not give it the light of day. Just my $0.02.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
Sun and Google also said they would jointly promote Sun's Java Desktop operating system and its Open Office productivity software system, a free, open-source productivity software suite. The partnership could mark a shift away from the traditional method of distributing software through the Microsoft Windows system and bring greater visibility to such Java-based programs as OpenOffice.org.
They will promote a Java desktop program. Whoopee! More marketing, that's impressive.
It could mark a shift away from Microsoft. Whoopee! It COULD be something.
It does say Java-based programs, implying something running in the browser, but I wonder how many people will be happy waiting for some huge word processor applet to download to work on a document .
There sure isn't much substance there.
Infuriate left and right
probably more like:
Invent and write story in blog that the company everybody loves is going to destroy the company everybody loves to hate. People believe it because they want to.
Buy stock in the company everybody loves to hate at a discount.
Wait 3 days for everybody to realize its just lies.
Sell stock for big profit.
News Flash, SEC starts to investigate bloggers.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
That's what I see happening here. The problem is that it's just plain awkward to have to open a browser window do type a term paper. I don't know. I just think most people will sum it all up by saying, "Well it's definately annoying sometimes but I guess it's better than paying $500 for MS Office." But they won't have much good to say other than that. MS Office is a premium product. People who switch for whatever reason will miss many things about MS Office.
It's not going to be an overnight thing. But hopefully with many many more users OO will get much better providing a solution to 99% of what a normal home user needs an office product for.
The risk is that it won't be a smash hit. People will try it out and will not see much benefit over the MS Office that they already use for free at college/work or have already have paid for at home.
I hope it works but I'm doubtful.
OpenOffice(TM) is a trademark of some other company, not Sun. Therefore OpenOffice.org is the name of the LGPL'd part of StarOffice. It's in the FAQ if anybody actually bothered to read it.
OpenOffice.org name FAQ
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Here's someone who kept the old Corel Java Office. I remember being cautiously exited about this, but it turned out the computers of that time and the bandwith generaly available were a killer for this app (pun intended)...
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Rich content WEB services such as GOOGLE EARTH, Have never been
possible due to lack of bandwith.
If I wanted to runn a web based app like those darn java applets
that couldn't compete with apps running local.
Now, With Broadband in place(4 Mbps or more), You can access a Full fledged app
from the web and and rival in performance with your locally install MS Crap.
Microsoft bussiness model:
Control the distribution channel (CD's/preinstalled)
Pay for programs, not conent.
Google bussiness model:
Control the distribution channel (WEB-HOSTS-SERVICES/WI-FI)
Pay for conent, not programs.
The clock is ticking
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
I don't buy it. The situation is more complex than that. The web is changing the way software is designed and that's good thing. Thing will not be the same. But it's not an either/or world. There is such a thing as nuance.
My take.
The most interesting scenarios are not entirely Web-based. I think the world is not going to go entirely one way (Web-based) or the other (all PC/device-based). The most interesting scenarios take advantage of the easy deployment and easy updating of Web-based applications and the power of PC-based applications. Note: didn't say Windows but Windows will be a major player for many many years to come IMHO.
There are lots of reasons for this. First, let's talk applications. While web email systems like Hotmail of Gmail are nice, they're clunky compared to a full email client like Outlook. I have played around with some of the Web (Ajax) based "productivity" applications (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_usin g_Ajax/) for links to some examples and they're nice but nothing compared to Office or a good PC-based personal information manager. Try them for yourself to see.
Then there's hardware. PC and mobile device hard ware is getting incredibly cheap. I just bought a duel core 3.3 mhz systemn with 2 gigs of ram and 1 tb of disck space for less than $3,000. There are literally billions of PC's out in the world and will be billions of smart phones out there within a few years. Just this week MIT talked about the $100 PC coming. Why would we want to use all of that processing power for nothing more than driving dumb-terminals with browsers? It just doesn't make sense. Software developers should build applications that use that processing power to do cool things that you can't with purely Web-based applications.
Then there's privacy and security. You can whine all you want about problems with security of Windows or PC's in general but I would guess that most people are still more comfortable having their personal information on their own PC rather than up in the cloud. Do you really want your Quicken files sitting on a server somewhere? I'm sure people will get more comfortable with this over time but I don't think these concerns will ever go away entirely.
Then there's connectivity. Sure, someday connectivity may be 100% pervasive but I don't see that happening any time soon. I live in a very "wired" city and there are still many many places where I can't get WiFi access or even decent wireless phone service. Do I really want to rely completely on Web-based applications for my computing? Not this decade.
The good news is that good software developers will find ways to give users the best of both worlds. Although it will take time to come to fruition, I think amazing applications will come along that have locally running code, combined with code running on servers that deliver experiences we can barely imagine. I saw a demo at Microsoft's PDC last month of an application developed for 3M. The application ran in a browser (IE now but relatively trivial to make it work in other modern browsers) that used Windows Vista's new presentation technology running on the PC and connected out to Web services to deliver an absoltely amazing experience. Because the application used local resources the graphics were incredible - 3D zooming, great navigation, rich graphics etc. But the application also connected up to Web-based resources using Web services to bring data into the application. The application runs
Upgrade in process.....
:p
hahaha... That's one way to handle a slashdotting
I'm convinced that the partnership (the ACTUAL one, not the speculation) is done for a very good reason. That means that Google wants Java available for an app, and bundling like they've done is a way to get it without making people hunt for a seperate install. That said, OO.o is not a Java app. They've got something else in mind.
There's been a lot of talk the last year or so about Google implanting a web server in Google Desktop, so they could run gmail while offline, and other apps as well. Maybe a web server written in Java? It frees them from writing to a certain OS, at least.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Open Office is most certainly *not* going to be a web based application. My guess is that it will be refitted to be launched by the google toolbar and allow you to use google as a storage area for your documents (do you really want to do that?). That's great that it's free though.
There is no war here, move along.
We all know what happenned to the big bad IBM of yesterday...
Microsoft could easily introduce a DHTML bug (unintentionally?) in IE7 that would have broken google's AJAX-based app, and there there goes market share.
If the spreadsheets are stored on the google servers where they are easilly accessed by other coworkers...
I'm tired of emailing my coworker a spreadsheet that is at a clients house, has to download the email open it, use it, close it, email it and hope I haven't done anything with it.
It's the sound of hundreds of chairs in being violently thrown across rooms in Redmond...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Instead of quibbling over nuances, consider this: Is it technically feasible to do this? Would there be any benefit? You betcha. Roger Kay's dinosaur quote below is great. It's funny, whenever you see one of those Microsoft adverts with the dinosaurs, it makes me think what a great OpenOffice add it would be, with Microsoft's Bob being one of the dinos.
Lighting up Bill Gate's competitive brain wiring is the stupidest mistake possible.
Microsoft is good at certain things (they never quit, they only get better, they listen to their customers and they admit when they are wrong are just a few) but what they are REALLY good at is polishing off the competition - and Google just made themselves the competition.
You could argue that MS picked the fight by going into the search business BUT that was like BUSINESS. This is PERSONAL.
I give Google 5-7 years on the outside.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
Microsoft to heavily invest in chairs. Balmer rumored to be working out.
Everyone is hyping this out of control, if you look at the actual deal, the main thing going on is that Google gets to have it's spyware-like toolbar installed when you install Java. Because the Java install needed more bloat.
One of the big reasons that I might be interested in a web based word application is version control. How many times have you had a document get out of date and emailed around and basically totally messed up? Microsoft is attempting to address this with Sharepoint but last time I used it when your word document opened up in IE it felt wrong and things didn't save right, it was a mess.
It seems like there are a few wikis out there (JotSpot) that try to give users the feel as though they are editing a word doc but as a JotSpot user I can report that they still have some bugs to iron out, after struggling with the GUI editor I just use the text editor with wiki markup. Google could make some waves in this space.