No Office Suite Google

Simon (S2) writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin has quashed speculation that the giant ad broker is to introduce a web-based Office suite. "We don't have any plans," he told Web 2.0 conference organizer John Battelle (pictured below). However Brin left the door open a little. Documents would be easier to work with in the future, he promised, but he didn't think a fat client was the way to go. "I don't really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly," he told Battelle. However distributed thin web applications allowed you to do "new and better things than the Office package and more.""

Comments

What good?

[free space]

What good is a web based office suite anyway? ( not a rhetorical question...I'm really wondering)
Allowing people to collaborate on the same document online,is already possible in traditional office suites+groupware. And centralized storage of documents is avaliable via, you know, Yahoo Briefcase.
so what exactly would a web office suite bring to the table, aside from the coolness factor?

The article was a joke...

[MightyYar]

...making fun of people who speculate on Google's "next move".

So let me give them fodder!

Distributing OpenOffice wouldn't be useful. What would be useful, imho:

• A simple word processor meant for short-ish documents that would work with gmail such that I could email PDF versions of the documents. Perhaps instead of PDFs, simply a link to the document that is hosted by Google.
• A google wiki. Something that lets my whole group coordinate on making a knowledge base using simple, intuitive tools.
• A simple presentation tool, similar to the word processing tool.
• A photo editor, charting tool, and other basic peripheral applications.

Now, the trick is to tie them all together such that I don't need to ever exit google.com. For instance, I might want to include a picture from the internet into my presentation. I should be able to, for instance, click on something like "insert photo from internet" and be able to use google images to find the right picture. I should never have to save things to and from my computer (though it would be nice to have that ability if necessary!). I think between Yahoo's new mail interface that demonstrates drag-and-drop, and the impressive Google mapping features, there is a demonstrated availability of the necessary technology to implement at least a basic office suite.

Well, that's disappointing, but

[dep01]

Sure, that is a disappointing announcement. I was really looking forward to seeing what Google could do with an online Office app. However, they *ARE* up to something. They're having that secret "invite-only" press conference on, I think, October 26th. Perhaps that's to announce Google's "Calendar app" though. Not sure. I'm waiting excitedly. I'm a big fan of Google (though Google Reader has yet to grow on me at all).

Re:Why Not?

[hpavc]

Yeah, a simple and supported 'save/open this document to/from google' for staroffice/openoffice/msoffice would be insane. A little love for publishing and saving the documents (ala yahoo briefcase).

Then the industry can think about it.

Imagine a google 'document mangement, backup, revision control' product for your personal and office documents. Not to mention the sexy search.

Re:Damn slashdot submitters!

[BushCheney08]

Gotta love this little bit from the end of TFA: Picture credit: John C Dvorak

Yes folks, this bird was intended for everyone's favorite tech pundit.