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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.""
I don't see any picture below...
I hate it when story submitters just copy and paste from other news articles, not even giving them credit. It occasionally causes phrases that don't make sense, like this one.
But this notion of them as the new Microsoft is just delusional. Journalists have jumped on it because it's a fun story, investors have to explain the ludicrous stock price and Slashbots have because a web-based, subscription-based, proprietary office suite with who-knows-what file formats seems like a fantastic idea if it will involve sticking it to Microsoft.
Look. This is a company with a great indexing and ranking engine, a great backend and a great sense of design and offering value to customers. That's, uh, great, it really is. Google should be proud. But to say that they can just bang out a Javascript-based office suite because you guys think it would be fun is simply nuts. It's not like they have magic powers over there, no matter what the cafeteria serves.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Steve Jobs said flash-based players were CRAP right until he unveiled Apple's flash-iPod. So Sergey can keep on shouting: "we ain't doing it!" all the way to hell, but if someone can develop a Web-based solution for working with documents, that is Google. And I do believe that there must be better ways of creating stuff than with de MS Office paradigm.
So I say, not seeing is believing.
Disclosure: I'm stupid
You would be right, except for the fact that people are already doing it.
If you don't believe it can be done, check out the actual applications. What many people don't seem to realize when they scoff at the idea of an AJAX based office quite is that Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Konqueror, all have "design mode" APIs that allow a user and JavaScript to manipulate the web page directly. Combine that with some excellent import/export filters for HTMl to popular office formats, and you have a decent office suite framework already at your grasp.
If you really don't think it can be done, look at those sample apps, and consider that they are done with basically no budget. Now throw the mihgt of Google, it's money, and it's developers at the problem. It is not beyond feasability that they could construct such a suite in a matter of months, especially when you consider that 80% of the functions in MS Office are only used by 20% of the people
Also consider how well this would integrate with their existing core competancies (indexing and searching). You could store all your documents online ina shareable Google store, and they woudl already all be indexed and searchable. You could use your Google addrfesss book to select other people who would be allwed to access and search the documents. And of course you would use Google Talk to collaberate on them.
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.
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