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Office Tools On The Web
ReadWriteWeb writes "What will be the primary elements of an Office Suite for the Web be? Who among the big or small companies is currently providing the best examples? ZDNet's Richard MacManus reviews the contenders for collaborative Web Office tools. Some of these products may well be acquisition targets this year for Microsoft and Google, as it is anticipated that both companies will release fully functional Web Office Suites sometime in the next few years."
Because I haven't heard of any of these things. Seems like if you want to contend with MS Office, you're going to need to get more notariety.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Microsofts product will be bloated, proprietary, and prone to crashes for years.
Googles product will be minimalist, open, and in beta for years.
Let's check the facts:
Microsoft has a VERY large and very well-developed office suite that connects quite elegantly to a bunch of Microsoft's back office software.
So these start-ups are going to usurp that somehow?
Also, some people love to lease cars, but when it comes to software, I don't see it happening so much.
What they may do is fill some very small gap.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It's a web-based (AJAX?) management tool that my company uses to handle our scheduling, inventory, invoicing, CRM, etc. It's really slick, but useful (it reminds me a lot of GMail).
Really, web services like Avalon, GMail, and Flickr are coming along nicely. It's a lot nicer to be able to access your data and tools from anywhere than it would be to have to install software on a dozen computers.
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What are the advantages of having an online Office Suite? I'd say that the disadvantages include: security issues, slow speed, dependance on internet connection, limited features, harder to program, and probably many others. What is the point?
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Failure, I suspect.
What advantage does any web-based office application have to justify the incredible risks of allowing your data out-of-house and being dependent on a working Internet connection to be able to do anything?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Didn't we hear just a while ago, in relation to all of the OpenOffice controversy, that IBM was developing some sort of thin-client office productivity suite? I distinctly remember hearing something about it. Actually I remember thinking that it sounded much more Google's style than IBM ... but it was cool nonetheless.
I'm not really sure who they were/are planning on marketing it to -- developing countries, perhaps? -- and I'm not sure that the recent past has really shown much support for the whole "the network is the computer" concept, but maybe they could sell it to people as a cost savings. Get one reasonably priced server, and a dozen or so diskless thin clients, and you could outfit a whole classroom with computers without buying a single copy of Windows or Microsoft Office. And nobody ever has to worry about moving their work from one computer to another, it's always stored and available.
There are a lot of good things that could be said for such a system. It would take me a while to get over my hesitation to use a web browser for anything BUT web browsing, though.
Here is the article I think I heard about it from:
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5208998.html
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Imagine the news - "Office Farm Servers Hacked Last Night".
Local security just feels safer, even when it's not.
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I find it completely insane that people consider Firefox, a browser where memory leaks are classified as "features," to be a viable application deployment platform. A web browser is only as strong as its weakest open window. The vast majority of browsers-with-no-extensions-installed have no protection against crashes at all. The only cure to this problem is auto-saving of documents.
Linux, Mac OS X, and even recent Windows releases are actually quite stable if you use good drivers. Why tie an important application to the weakest link in any system (the network) and a foundation that was clearly not made to handle such demands (a web browser)?
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What will be the primary elements of an Office Suite for the Web be?
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how about Word processing, spreadsheet and presentation?
duh
So we have hardware -> os -> browser -> web site -> office suite
Why not cut out the web site bollocks? Honestly, not everything has to be on the web. If I *really* wanted a centralised office suite I'd add a VNC server and connect over ssh.
Deleted
I have to completely and utterly disagree with you. Web pages are not the best place for web apps, nor will they ever be. And why should they? Web pages were meant for displaying originally static text. The fact that it can be made dynamic, is an add-on, rather than a thought out plan. AJAX/DHTML come off more as a kludge than anything else.
.net, Cocoa, GTK, or QT. There's a lot of work put in to those libraries. Unless you think those libraries are all fluff, then I'm not sure how you get from href's and text to something as complex as an office suite. And it is complex. If it weren't, M$ office wouldn't have the hold it does.
You want systems that were made for complex user interface tasks? Try
If you want a simple text editor that can do minimal tasks, sure, web interfaces are *okay*. But compare that to something like abiword, which is still free (or openoffice, if you want), and they *still* can't compare.
Why even try to do a web office suite? To make it cross platformable? Once again, abiword and openoffice have this covered. Remember, the internet consists of more than just webpages. There's lot of ways of transporting data. If you want something that can run anywhere, a solid crossplatform library should be used. QT and GTK are two good examples of this.