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Writely.com Beta - Google's Answer to Word
bahree writes "Google has launched their beta version of Writely.com. Writely is their word processor and answer to Microsoft Word. In addition to the usual editing features it includes many collaboration features, as well as the ability to save documents as PDFs and RSS feeds."
What's with the lack of a direct link? Oh right, blogvertising. Forgot.
(check the blog's title for a laugh from the author's mental age by the way)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Seriously, since I heard about Google's infinite retention policy, I'm even afraid of using google search anymore. For the simpler stuff I use other search engines. Half the pages I go to have Google ads and by using gmail and google groups, they've got a lot of information on me.
The last last thing I want to do is use Google to edit my documents.
It hasn't happened as much yet but soon I expect to go somewhere and see Google ads with very interesting (to me) titles. Then, I'll click and spend time on it and make me feel like I need to buy this or that.
Seriously, someone has to start an open-source project to write a super-duper search engine code so that websites can use it to search themselves. It's easier to use google to search through slashdot that to use the slashdot search feature (which sucks really bad by the way).
We have open source firefox and thunderbirld, we need open source code for searching.
I'm staying away from Google calendars and google what nots from now on due to privacy concerns.
Remember, anything on someone else's server is destined to become public knowledge. It may be inadvertent, it may be because of a court order, a government investigation, a rogue employee, or because someone hacks the server. In the future world of software as a service, where your personal data is stored on someone else's computer, the privacy of that data is only as good as the technical, legal, and political environment makes it. For the US, as recent months have proven, that means there is no privacy you can count on. So be sure you never write about your questionable deductions on your income tax, or your recent affair in the Bahamas, or how you managed to carry banned items on your last airplane trip, or anything else you wouldn't want public, when using this service.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
As a business, why would I use an office suite that requires me to (in effect) give a copy of all of my documents to another corporation, when I have a perfectly good alternative that only costs a few hundred bucks per seat? The privacy concerns for this thing are far too great to overcome the cost advantage for a business that cares about keepings its corporate secrets secret.
...or hassles later?
The reviewer says Writely might be useful because downloading and installing OOo is too much of a hassle. Hmm...what about the hassle of managing two sets of files: one on your computer's hard disk and one on the google grid? The confusion when you end up with two versions of the same file, one on your computer and one on google's grid? What about the hassle that comes when you want to edit your document, but you don't have internet access at the moment? What about the hassle when you find out it doesn't work in the browser you have installed on the machine you're using at the moment? What about the hassle when your document gets too big, and Writely's performance starts to be unacceptable?
AJAX is fundamentally a bad idea. It's an attempt to use a web browser and http for something they were never designed to do, and they can't do without browser-specific hacks on the developer's side, and breaking lots of familiar conventions on the user's side. It's also a retreat into proprietary software, at a moment when a full-featured stack of open-source apps is pretty much ready for prime time.
Find free books.
One advantage I can see is that your documents will be available anywhere you can get access to the web, which can be a pretty compelling argument. I also suspect that Google will try to sell a complete Office server to corporates, which will let them keep their data secure on their private servers while still letting their employees access these documents from the web. In fact, I'd bet that's why MS is so scared of Google.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
"...why would I use an office suite that requires me to (in effect) give a copy of all of my documents to another corporation, when I have a perfectly good alternative that only costs a few hundred bucks per seat?"
:)
Any business with a competent IT staff is already putting all its documents in the hands of another corporation on a regular basis in the form of off-site backups. This just automates the process
Anyone want to start a pool on what CSS/javascript features get broken or removed in future releases of IE7 as Microsoft tries to kill Writely and Google Spreadsheets?
The reason you'd use Google everything as a small business, isn't because you'd save $<small> on MS Office. It's because you'd save $<large> on servers & an IT Department.
Would you rather set up exchange, some open source calendaring app, or goocal?
Me too.
So you're right, it's cost vs secrecy, but the cost savings is gigantic.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.