Slashdot Mirror
17 Web Based Competitors to MS Office
prostoalex writes "Red Herring magazine takes a look at 17 projects in the Web 2.0 space competing with Microsoft Office for the attention of the office workers worldwide. The table lists Thinkfree, Zoho Writer, Writeboard, Google Writely, Rallypoint and JotSpot Live as Microsoft Word competitors, JotSpot Tracker, Numsum, iRows, Zoho Street as Microsoft Excel alternatives, S5, Zoho Show as PowerPoint contenders, ThinkFree, gOffice and Zoho Virtual Office as suite offerings. Even Microsoft Project has its fair share of Web 2.0 competitors: Basecamp and JotSpot Project Manager made the list."
And here I was, thinking I could write a text document without Internet access. How stupid of me.
For more information, click here.
that is my online word processor of choice. I keep all necessary apps on an SD card with a portable reader. My documents are secured. My home server is backed up to resources under my control. plus I can use it from any one of the computers at my place. Its like a mobile desktop.
When all else fails, try.
Are they really competing with Microsoft Office that much? I'm not sure they really are: while there is some overlap (especially with where Office is headed), they seem to be somewhat different target universes of usess.
Google Spreadsheets
I think there are some really intresting places you can go with workflow with an online suite. Suddenly you don't have people emailing links to documents on a file server or changing a file name to denote a new version... yes, they are managers that will do that work for you, but these systems can make that flow effortless.
I've seen serveral groups of people already setup a basecamp and a writely account in order to colaberate on personal or non-work related projects, and it's starting to work. It's a new way of thinking that will take some time to bring to the light of day, but should make for an intresting "upgrade" to the current ways in which people work.
I'd like some clarification of your type-o. Is that "different target universes of users" or "different target universes of useless"? Because I could easily agree with it either way.
Developers: We can use your help.
Can anybody summarize for me, what exactly, is the point of any of these products, and why I, or anyone else, should even consider using these things? Sure, they may be neat-o, but don't successful products generally have some sort of purpose?
Listen, I don't know how to phrase this, so I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm from the future.
I know that sounds crazy, but you have to believe me. When I went to sleep last night, it was 2006 -- nearly seven years from now!
We had long since buried what you people, in this section of spacetime, circa December 1999, call "the new economy." We renamed that "the dot-com bubble." Over six long years, we learned to deeply regret having funded mediocre, copycat websites with humdrum ideas, cute names and wayyyy too much money to burn.
This "Red Herring" you read so avidly went out of a business after peaking at 600 pages. All of the startups it writes about and collects advertising checks from will soon be out of business.
I can't give away too much, because I've seen Back to the Future and know how dangerous it can be to frig with the timespace continuum. But I have a clue for you: when you see a cluster of companies whose names all sound like Atari 2600 games, WALK AWAY. I mean, seriously, "Rallypoint?" NumSum? S5?
Oh, also? There's going to be a presidential election soon. No matter how alike you think the candidates are, vote for the one from Tennessee, not from Texas. The Texas guy is a FRIGGIN' FRIGTARD.
Anyway, I gotta go try and crash some dot-com parties before I go to sleep tonight and end up back in 2006. Adios dot-com amigos!
because, face it, if you can't text edit with Vi, you really shouldn't be trying to work Open Source.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...though "useless" kinda works, when you consider how much better, e.g., TeX with the appropriate packages is at lots of the things that Word (or PowerPoint) are used for.
I really can't say I trust the trend towards "online only" and that other trend, "document vaults". Borrowing functionality at the price of depending on a certain type of access disturbs me. I thought we learned about stuff vaporizing from 1999, as mentioned elsewhere.
Not counting special exports into MS office products, I don't do anything fancy with word processing. So I really have my eyes on Open Office Calc (and perhaps Thunderbird). Calc is in "Beta 2" as I recall. Let's say they're a year out from signing off on Version 2, and a year after that, doing Beta 3.
If these guys have downloadable real apps that *happen to connect online* then I'll give them a hard look. If nothing else, the privacy issues bother me with "work on my server!".
--TaoPhoenix
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
How is a word processor considered a competition for the entire office suite? Especially when you consider that MS Word is coming for free with a lot of systems and that Wordpad is just about as good as some of these web apps?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
the killer applications of the MS Office suite isn't Eord or Excel, its Outlook with Exchange , public folders, sharepoint, active directory, GAL, calendars , reminders,
all packaged in a nice point and click install interface managed by an equally nice point and click management enviroment (typing pages of shell commands in an 80's throwback style really wont do in the 21st century) and seamlessly integrated within the whole suite
these online clones address none of that functionality and are nothing more than glorified text/html editors, its like trying to choose a linux distribution, hundreds to choose from, all doing more or less the same thing but badly (driver support, consistancy, etc etc)
but whatever, us in the professional world will stick with what works well and the hobby gang will continue to emulate it , poorly
but the fact of the matter is that if I had a truly portable, cross-platform office program even with limited functionality, it would make my life easier. I'm using Writely now and so far like it. I want to be able to write (that's what I do) and not have to worry too much about installs and upgrades and the like. The fact that writely saves in ODF format is great.
Put it this way: I've been thinking about getting a MacBook but haven't wanted to run NeoOffice on it while running OpenOffice everywhere else. Beyond that, OpenOffice is a beast that can do most anything even when 95% of what I do is type plain text with minor formatting. Having the option of Writely that works in Firefox which, in turn, works on everything, is a bonus for me and opens up all sorts of options.
All that said, I know that there will be times when the network will be down. I'll have other options. But as the network reliability has increased I worry less and less about this sort of thing.
Say what you want about this or that other solution or about the redundancy of this, but couple it with Gmail and it's something on the order of a killer-app.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Don't you think that the word "competitor" is a bit strong? Come on! That's like saying your dad singing in the shower is competition for Adrea Bocelli.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I kind of feel like Microsoft is either dead, or its limbs are dying while its head remains talking. Meanwhile the little companies are nibbling at the carcass of what used to be its market share. But I could be wrong about that. After all, I am using Windows now. But then again, I am using little of Windows except the core OS: I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Vim. The parts of Windows that I use could be handled by many other OSes.
Anyway, check out what MS has been up to (the short list) http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/malfy.html
...typing pages of shell commands in an 80's throwback style really wont do in the 21st century...
Geee... I suppose that's also why Microsoft is overhauling their command-line shell, because it is so f**king useless. What looks like crap to the PHB isn't always crap to the guy who keeps that beautifully integrated Outlook/Exchange combo and all of those nifty organizational tools that management types like to play with working so deliciously smoothly.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
These sorts of "applications" would have been news half a decade ago if Internet Explorer hadn't paralyzed the Web. After all, the idea of remote apps running on thin clients (or brower-type software) has been around since the beginning. Really, the MSIE trick was brilliantly executed... a combination of the "bundling", and also beating the "competition" (Netscape) at the games MS already played best. Once MS had all but destroyed Netscape and the browser market, all it had to do was leave IE completely untouched, preventing anyone from using existing cross-platform standards to extend the Web to its inevitable conclusion: Remote applications that don't require playing nice with Microsoft's "platform", or following the "off the shelf software" rules. Had MS not shoved IE down everyone's throats with such timing and precision, things would be very different today... especially for Web developers, who would be writing fun, crazy stuff right now instead of drudging in ancient, stagnant pools of HTML, browser-compatibility workarounds, and hacky "AJAX" scripting.
All is not lost, of course, because MS got lazy - or just plain dropped the ball - during the time it had bought itself by crushing Web development, what with the Vista delays, and the chair-throwing headache of their inscrutable arch-nemesis Google, et cetera. And lets not forget the heroics of Firefox!
Anyways, people have a good reason to be skeptical about the actual apps in TFA, but keep in mind: These are but the first generation of a breed of software that has waited a long, painful time to become reality.
I sampled both and have committed many useful spreadsheets to my EditGrid account. They are constantly updating features and have yet to screw it up in the process from what I've seen.
In many ways, I find the online features more useful than Excel:
On the other hand, you couldn't pry my copy of Office 2000 (in particular Excel) from my cold dead hands. It's a very powerful, fast, and well established tool, period.
Sounds like what you need is LaTeX. Seriously, if what you do is type plain text with minor formatting, and you want something that's portable and available (nearly) anywhere, LaTeX seems like the best option.
Plus, your documents won't look like ass. Major bonus.
First of all there was a time when a few companies had word processing, spread sheet and other "office" software that was competing with Microsoft. They either did not market their products well enough or those products did not offer the funcitonality and/or compatability of the MS Office suite and for the most part fell by the wayside. MS was not the leader in "office" type software, I know I had to use the other crap when I was in the Army and was relatively greatful to see some of the other products ditched (Although I will always have a soft spot for Word Perfect). MS came in strong and with what was at the time a far more superior product that what anyone else was offering as an entire suite that could work relatively well with each other and unfortunately for everyone else now hold the same kind of stranglehold over the market as their OS's do. Now, it's just like the OS market; there will always be a product that will cut into the market share of a company like Microsoft; hell when you have 85/90%+ of any particular market it's a lot easier to lose ground than gain it at that point. MS Office has entrenched itself so deep into the commercial, personal and government sectors so thoroughly that it will be quite sometime before they are no longer reign supreme. To prove my point, as most of you /.'s probably read as I did. When Pluto was reclassified and they decided upon using "Pluton" as a naming convention geologists were upset because that term is already used. But "IAU head Owen Gingerich is quoted as saying that he was only peripherally aware of the definition, and because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important."
I kind of rest my case on that note.
Which one of these Web 2.0 Buzzword technology enhanced applications come as the default for nearly every computer? It's not competition if nobody knows about it or cares to learn it because Windows apps are already right there.
We've used Basecamp for the last year successfully for our business, which is great for working with our remote clients. We have had the opportunity to heavily use Writeboards within our Basecamp account for the last few months with our clients.
The great thing about being web based is that we all see the same thing, and the document history of Writeboards is great to flip back through time to see the changes we have made.
Now I don't see this as a replacement to Word for daily business use, but for document collaboration it is truly a great tool.
Good job guys.
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
The state-of-the-art has benefited from Microsoft's 333 pages of Internet Standards and Protocols as well as their upcoming, 400+ page Guide to Defect Prevention
I'm not sure that I'd call Basecamp a competitor for MS Project, either.
I'm doing work on one project right now that's making use of both. For my purposes, Basecamp is more useful, but I don't see project manager types replacing MS Project or other PM systems with it any time soon. It's just not the same kind of thing.
I think that LaTeX would be fine if I wanted to take the time to learn another formatting language. Back when I was at Clarkson University (before failing out, alas) I used something called Galahad which was a text editor on which users could apply formatting if they new all of the dot-A commands (.a ll=something or other and so on). I used to know most of those commands. I don't anymore.
I've been using Gmail as a kind of portable text editor that keeps track of all my files online and it's good, but these apps are better. Maybe LaTeX and ftp would do the same thing, but why wouldn't I and most average users use these online apps instead?
All I'm saying is that these things are going to appeal to a lot of people especially those who see that Dell now charges an additional amount to get Office instead of just tucking that price into the price of the machine.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
When I'm at home, OpenOffice does everything I need. When I'm anywhere else, I always use Portable OpenOffice from my flash drive.
how many office users even know about these services, much less choose to use them over M$ which is likely provided for their workspace?
LaTeX is hardly minor formatting. It is unsurpassed in creating good-looking printed output that must conform to a specific layout. Academic articles, books, screenplays, term papers. It is equally good at creating PDF files, the point being that these are virtual paper pages.
People who are already handy with LaTeX can use it to do just about anything with it, but I would make the same observation about PowerPoint users.
LaTeX is not an editor. When I work with LaTeX I actually use Lyx, a GUI editor designed to output LaTeX documents. Orders of magnitude easier than working with raw LaTeX.
To see "minor" applied to LaTeX is like describing the Mississippi river as a minor waterway.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Log into the zoho writer site using the demo account and browse through the documents that are auto saved as people try it out. I've seen medical documents, an employee's request for time off from Tweeter, a letter to an insurance company, all kinds of stuff. The demo account is insecure by design, of course. But I can't help but feel a little concerned about having all of my personal documents in the hands of an online service.
In my experience, old versions of Office(starting from '97) have 99% of the functionality needed. With all those copies sitting around...who needs to pay MS for new versions?
Office is the one thing Microsoft got right, and it's done, finished, paid for.
The google thing looks nice, but there's no logical need to be online, so why? To decrease user privacy and gain more marketing info?
"If you don't have eyes you shouldn't have wings" -- Carl Pilkington
OpenOffice.org is possibly the stupidest name ever. Why is the ".org" there?
Because extensive marketing studies conducted on North American consumers between the ages of 17-55 indicated strongly that "OpenOffice.bleh" lacked cross-gender name appeal and "OpenOffice.bling" made everyone want to go out and buy the latest Lil John and the East Side Boyz CD rather than do any serious office work.
* * * * * *
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
--Groucho Marx
Same here. Once in a great while I might need a spreadsheet. Nothing fancy, just a basic spreadsheet. I really don't want to install some giant thing on my computer knowing that I will only use it three or four times a year.
evil is as evil does
Until you lose your internet connection. My wife's law firm has had more than one disaster in their high-rise this year which has resulted in them being able to use their computers, but not get internet access. No one thinks of that until it starts costing you the equivalent of $5000-$10000 or more an hour to be without it.
I read that as Zohar writer. Which would be handy, if you want to write a Kabbalistic masterpiece in pigeon aramaic.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The common complaint is that OO.org runs in X, and initially that was a problem. It is no longer so because Apple has implemented X very well, even with cut and paste between environments mostly working. The biggest issue is fonts, which can be easily transfered to X, and keyboard controls, which are more like the MS Windows controls than the Mac. If you are, like me, used to using many different machines it is not a problem.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Some alternate title suggestions:
;)
"17 alternatives to the car"
"17 alternatives to living in a house"
"17 alternatives to working"
"17 alternatives to breathing"
All feasable, none very likely
Instead of saving your documents online, why not save them on a thumb drive? That way you don't have to worry about actually having the program, and your data remains with you. True, you have the extra step of making sure your data is only saved on your thumb drive, but I like the idea of just carrying your data and not worrying about specific programs.
here I was, thinking I could write a text document without Internet access. How stupid of me.
Just think, some people think they can share text without Microsoft Word. Amazing isn't it?
That's really what this is about, being able to co-operate in authoring formated text without having to sync everyone's $400 text editor. If all you want is to mod a configuration file, by all means use a free vi. If you have to co-operate with ten other people to make formatted text output, these services will be much cheaper and easier than the brain dead method common in the fortune 500 world, "standardizing on M$ Office" and the swapping bloated results via email. For internal documentation, these people should be moving to wikis. For anyone who still needs paper, and I'm not sure why they do, web services are a great way to go.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
It will be the company that perfects importing and exporting to Microsoft Word.
When people discover that they can use a better word processor AND not have to worry about working on shared material with their Word-bound colleagues, you'll see adoption soar in the non-geek workplace.
How is a word processor considered a competition for the entire office suite?
If you read so much as the summary, you would have noticed spreadsheets and presentation tools too. Those will go a long way to competing, even if they don't have as many features.
If you understand what M$ is selling with M$ Office, you understand why the new services are such a great threat. What M$ is selling is the ability of "information workers" to co-operate in the creation of "complex business documents". What that boils down to is formatted text with a few graphs, figures and equations along with a presentation with the same. There's much FUD about Open Office not being able to work "100%" with M$ Office. It's FUD because M$ Office does not work 100% with itself because it's format has been ruined by decades of anti-competitive effort. The more they change it the less well it works. Web services leap all of that FUD in a single bound and provide better sharing and reliability to boot. If you had ten employees, would you deck them all out with $600 worth of OS and M$ Office so they can then abuse your network server with Word Docs and Power Point, or would you rather transfer a few bytes to a service you can invite anyone in the world to join as needed? If you don't buy the latest and greatest M$ Office every two years, the first option won't really let you share with others outside the company regardless of how long your users wait for email. More is on the way and these services will get better. When people get used to the new workflow, stand alone office suits with impossible file formats will finally be a thing of the past. Good riddance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Mod me down if you will, but I've tried some of these apps, and I spent quite some time with Writely and Google Spreadsheets and I haven't been impressed at all.
Writely and the other text processors are at the level of Windows Write, a way to enter text with some rich text formatting. I mean, forget Table of Contents or an Equation Editor (things I use in most documents), where are rulers, the user-defined tabs or the footnotes? How can you expect me to take these web apps seriously when I can't even set the header or footer or page size/layout?
As to Spreadsheets... I can't even customize the cell formatting to include the Euro sign (€) instead of US Dollar.
Like others have said,this is all hype. It may be cool to play with them for a while, but I don't see anyone doing anything serious with them.
Armand
www.RichNetApps.com
This reads like a joke but from the tone of the rest of the post, you sound serious. If so, I pity you and the coworkers you select applications for, if there are any. (Somehow, i doubt that.) Features are the very reason you buy stuff. Not all features are valuable to everyone, of course, but a complete lack of features is useless to everyone.
You also talk about the reliability of web services. I wish you were right, but you are dead wrong. We have a hosted solution at work, meaning that when internet access is down, no one can do *anything*. And that happens at least once a month. We also travel a lot, so we all have laptops. Unfortunately, we can't use them for anything productive, since we can't access the hosted environment while actually travelling. (But hey, I am now supremely skilled at Freecell...)
And finally, the FUD about MS changing file formats every two years is just flat out wrong. How often have they changed formats in the last ten years? Five times? I don't think so.
These comments would be a bit easier to read if I didn't get a Javascript Runtime Error whenever I scroll the page in IE - "Line 396, Error: Object Required", when using IE 6, 6.0.2900.2810.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519. Works on FireFox though.
This is the sort of thing that discourages people from relying on Web Based applications.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Yes but is anyone actually working on that? I've seen lots of converters, but all far from perfect. Google does a fairly good job of converting DOC to HTML, but it's just a rough approximation.
Maybe the reason nobody is working on it is fear - of being sued by M$ (for reverse engineering, for example).
Om
I was recently forced to use Basecamp in a recent client engagement - and it was freeking pretty slick. Simple, just a touch of Ajax, and it freeking working. Bye Bye Bloated MS Project!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Today.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This reads like a joke but from the tone of the rest of the post, you sound serious
Absolutely. If "changing file formats" were of a larger concern than features he would still be using an old version of Word Perfect and QuatroPro.
As long as these "web 2.0" apps rely on Javascript, they can't be trusted because Javascript is an exploit vector and a security headache. As far as I'm concerned, I'd prefer if Javascript didn't exist. Either a real security framework for Javascript needs to be invented (with access control policies), or Java needs to somehow be made as appealing as Javascript while remaining reasonably safe, or a new browser scripting language invented. The current situation with Javascript resembles the beginning of steam power, with boiler explosions. It's just unsafe.
Interesting link, but it's missing MS' use of "charitable contributions", epsecially in the developing world.
There's more published, especially in local papers, but as you see in the Salon article, it's part of an combination investment/PR campaign and both MS reps and shills come down on any thing other than "Yay Bill!" So questions and/or critique stay low profile and is hard to find.
Also, the mention of tax breaks is a bit of an under statement. MS pays almost nothing: IT giants who don't pay tax part 2: how Microsoft does it. There's a bit of a stink about MS in Europe using foreign tax havens. And, by the way, MS seems to make more money buying and selling its own stock that in does even from sales of MS Windows. Bill hopped off as CEO the same year MS ran an $18,000,000,000 USD loss. Now he's stepped down completely. That could be interpreted to suggest that this summer's massive stock buyback could be an indication of real bad situation in Redmond.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
So far, so good, spelling errors aside. The feature race Microsoft got into with WordPerfect Office and Lotus SmartSuite created a lot of esoteric bloat. This is where a lot of these web-based tools are seeing an opportunity.
Ah, well. It was good while it lasted.
Let's put the blame where it is due. Microsoft has made two fundamental format changes since Office 95. The first was in Office 97. It was different enough from 95 to break some compatibility, but it set the baseline for the 2000 and 2003 versions. Now, they're making the transition to XML, which started in 2003 and will be completed when 2007 goes gold. 2007 apps can save files as "Office 97/2003" format quite easily, or you can use the XML formats, which follow the "zip bundle" pattern used by OpenOffice.org and iWork.
The problem Microsoft forces us to deal with isn't a format that seems to be ever-changing, even when it's not. It's the licensing. Because Microsoft has those Office formats so tightly coupled with their purse strings, they're loathe to allow just anybody to read and write Office files easily. Thus, everybody had to reverse-engineer the formats, and hope they got it right. In fact, I'd estimate that 75% of "mangled" Office files involve a reverse-engineered file filter.
Office file formats are near to my heart right now. This is purely anecdotal, of course, but it eventually rambles its way to a point.
I frequently work with PowerPoint at my church, where we use it to present song lyrics and scripture during worship. We have a bunch of lyric sheets in "PowerPoint" files that were exported from Corel Presentations when they switched to Microsoft Office. I put PowerPoint in quotes because, while the files have a .ppt extension, Corel made a figurative hash of the export. For a long time, I had to open the files in a hex editor on my Mac because neither Keynote (my preferred app at the time) nor OO.o (both on my PC and in NeoOffice form on the Mac) would open any of those files. It wasn't until I downloaded the beta for Office 2007 that I could open the files in PowerPoint itself. Even then, the formatting was a mess, and the high-order bit of every character with an ASCII code > 127 was unset, leaving a bunch of "=" and "Y" characters where Corel had SmartQuote-d apostrophes and ellipses.
Notice where things really went wrong? By now, everybody has filters that can at least import well-formed Office files. But when an "unlicensed", reverse-engineered export filter (which I no longer have access to) fed malformed files to somebody else's "unlicensed", reverse-engineered import filter, I hit an impasse. And you see how this all works out for Microsoft in the end, as their product is the only one that makes an effort to salvage the bad files.
Somehow, I doubt Office XML will be licensed on terms suitable for use in products under OSI-approved licenses anytime soon. But the XML itself should be easier to reverse-engineer, so we have that going for us, which is nice. But we're going to be suffering the consequences of Office 97/2003 format for years to come.
(BTW, those Corel exports? I'm dumping the formatting and saving the lyrics as plain text. I am not going through this again.)
This sig intentionally left blank.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
>As to Spreadsheets... I can't even customize the
...
>cell formatting to include the Euro sign ()
>instead of US Dollar.
YET. Dude, it's *Google*. By next week, it'll
let you *print* friggin Euros for free
It won't be a killer app when you fire up the browser one day to read that your preferred silly-name company has gone out of business, sold to a commercial competitor, or worse... been hacked and all your documents are now freely available to be read be anyone (you may not care that your letter to mum is leaked, but a lot of companies that used this tool for all their sales documents will be pi**ed).
This means that there is definitely marketspace for desktop, offline-based office apps, and the web tools are a niche for people who cannot or do not want to pay for Word, or do not use those apps enough to justify buying them. Everyone else will just want to sync their Word documents with the online 'sharing space' and very occasionally edit them. You'd be better off with a copy of Openoffice and run Owl on your webserver.
Where? Even if that's too much for you, it comes with just about every new PC.
As the AC suggested: "Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims".
I wasn't referring to rendering issues, I was talking about things like saving user state and updating any visual element without clicking on a submit button, etc all without storing cookies on the client machine, placing hidden fields in the page, or executing a script or other hacks. A standard designed specifically for web apps should be able to handle these kinds of functions natively.
I think the answer to Office Software in general (not just MS Office) will be a switch to component-oriented systems. In a component-oriented world you don't need a giant company to produce a productivity application because smaller components produced by multiple third-party providers can collaborate to produce a better overall experience (e.g. a provider can concentrate on just producing the best spell-checker for use in larger environments). I have thought about this in more detail than I can post here, so please see the following URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/verdantium/