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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."
... to a complete office suite. I've been using the Google Spreadsheets for a little while from the link in my Gmail account. Signed up for Writely the other day when I saw it on Ars. Pretty neat for an online application. Not too much left for a nice office productivity suite, excpet maybe a database app and/or a presentation app.
No Safari support either, which may actually affect more users than the lack of Opera support, despite Firefox's popularity on Mac.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Writely has been available for almost a year. The only news is that they've finished sending invitations to the waiting list and reopened public registration.
I don't know about personal files, but I think that I'll be putting my blog posts in there. If they enhance the ability to post to my blog (wordpress) then I will probably actually just write all the posts there. But right now, I'll probably post to my blog, copy the text and then shoot over to writely and save it there. Obviously it is not private, but I like that google will be backing it up for me. The jokes above about it never going away are funny - but really, that is appealing for content that I intend to be public.
And if anyone is curious. The document I posted to my blog went over - but without the title or categories. That gets fixed and it is a nicer editor than the one built into wordpress itself.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Hmm. .ASPX. All your bases belog to us... I wonder how the asp environment works with the Google grid.
And the winner is: Writely!
I wrote about Writely a few days ago (and generally liked it). I wrote my own online word processor last year (KBdocs.com for my own use, then opened up free registration - got 1000+ uesers. My system was a 3 evening hack - generally OK, but not feature rich.
Google Calendars has a huge advantage because of the GMail integration. Writely.com's advantage will likely be a good integration with blogspot, etc.
Writely is missing the fundamental concept of page breaks. I imported an ODT and my manual page breaks were ignored, footnotes were all dumped at the bottom of the document (as opposed to the bottom of each page). It wasn't pretty.
It also failed to import the font correctly (I typed the document in ARIAL, not Times New Roman!). Everything else was fine, though.
It's the usual advantages from online stuff with some extras. You don't need to install anything, it's automatically always the latest version, accessibility, online real-time collaboration. But I'm not saying with that that it's better, because these offline clients offer tons more features, isn't dependant on network availability, feels more safely stored on e.g. a local drive, or corporate LAN. But it's different, and Google sees a niche.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
With most companies I might be a little more worried, but the way Google battled the US Goverment when they tried to get ahold of those records (as opposed to AOL who wetted itself and went and cried in the corner) is reassuring. Sure, they'll use the money for advertising. So what? That happens anyway. Even "outside" the Internet. Seriously, watch The Corporation if you don't believe real-world product placement exists. Data mining has been happening for decades before Google came along. So yeah, they do it. But I'd have to say they're probably the most responsible ones about it. The bottom line is it's nice to finally have a viable (and free!) solution to Word and Excel.
Putting the 33k in G33k.
You and I say "why can't this support safari,oper,konquerer?" The whole cross-platform concept is very very expensive. It requires developers, testers, a qa qualification process, time, etc. All that is waaay to much (even for a rich company) to invest in every project. Add into this mix the fact that most of Google Labs' ambitious projects... well... fade gracefully into the night... it's just not worth it.
We're all familiar with the process by now. Google releases a new Beta. People use it, or they don't. After a few months, if enough interest remains, Google will start putting some muscle behind its beta. Other ideas don't get so popular and never escape the Google Labs page. (though they don't exactly die either... more like a deep sleep) There are many examples of underdeveloped proof of concept projects at http://labs.google.com/ like the really cool Google Ride Finder. The world just isnt ready for that yet.
Also see Google Suggest, the oldest remaining beta (4 years!!). It's downright crappy webpage is a front for an underdeveloped topic detection algorithm. I wish they'd finish it or open the source
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Although you mean price when you say "free", it is interesting to note what Google's online services deprive you of.
I'm not free to run Writely on my own LAN so that my LAN users don't have to reveal the content of their documents to Google. For all I know, Google will leak a user's information and I'd rather not give them so much information to work with. They say they "take security very seriously" in their Writely tour but I can't prevent a disgruntled Google employee from distributing copies of information I've written with Writely except to not give them that information in the first place.
I'm also not free to modify Writely to suit my needs. So if I want to run the service on a machine in my house and provide that service to myself over the Internet, I can't make sure that the program does what I want it to do.
Most of the services Google offers are unimaginative and simply not attractive when one considers that they're indexing everything you do with them so that they can build saleable profile on you and possibly inadvertantly leak information to others. I'd rather run locally-hosted free software programs like OpenOffice.org.
Digital Citizen
Nah, the difference will be that Microsoft will bloat their offerings so much they won't fit through the office door. Google keeps `em down to the most utilized features -- those worth cramming into an Ajax app.
Privacy issues are a legitimate concern no doubt, but let me tell you: I'm a full time developer on the MS stack - including SharePoint - and the last thing in the world I'd ever want to have to use on a regular basis is a SharePoint portal. I've seen plenty of abandoned SP implementations, mainly over complexity, learning curve and sluggishness of navigation. I've seen none fully utilized.
If Google realizes how many concerns they'd ease by offering strong crypto, I think they'd win over that fraction of the market who, like you, are holding out over privacy conerns. For example, if they offered encrypted storage whereby they had only the public and not the private keys to the stored documents, I'd be fine with storing just about anything on their servers.
Pi Ran Out
ThinkFree does more, works on more browsers, is better integrated with the user's operating system (OMG, I actually get to use all my own fonts?), works with two-byte characters (OMG, I can type in Japanese and the saved .doc won't consist of little boxes?), and offers a stronger user experience (OMG, I still get cut/copy/paste, and undo/redo? And print?). Of course, /.'ers are expected to hate ThinkFree because it's written in Java.
Have fun reinventing the wheel as a stone cube, kids. Knock yourselves out.
As much as I want to like this kind of product, there is no way my company will let me write a document that can be read by google, the owners of each encountered router and the fine employees of the us government that can *legally* read by non US national data.
As much as Foogle makes me believe Sun's dream of a come back of centralized computing was only too early and poorly marketed, unless they offer a locally runnable copy of their fine software (Gmail, Writely, Spreadsheets), they will never get the corporate customer base.
In other words, no reasons to break chairs in Redmond.
Steve Jobs said during his WWDC keynote that Leopard will come as a single Universal Binary DVD, thus supporting the G4 architecture as well as Intel. This fact is stated on the Apple Leopard Preview web site as well.
Much as Tiger didnt run on non firewire G3's. To get us to upgrade.
As one of the engineers that coded that restriction, I perhaps have better insight than you about why it's there...
It wasn't "to get [you] to upgrade." It was because there was a significant change in the firmware around that era of machines. It's a lot easier to tell customers they need FireWire than to explain that OldWorld ROMs would no longer be supported.