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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."
That's all great for uber l337 folks like yourself, but what about the rest of the world?
You think Joe (or Jane) Businessman has any idea what ssh is? Or why on earth you're saving something to anywhere other than your hard drive?
I'll admit, you have a cool setup (as cool as ssh and vnc gets anyway), but it really doesn't help the average business person in the same way that many of TFA's apps do.
Being able to access documents via the web from anywhere needs to be as easy as possible for regular joe's, otherwise they have no reason to leave MS Office.
This is not the greatest
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 very fact that there are 17 of them tells you that at least 15 of them are not competing with Office any more than a kid on a bicycle is competing with Lance Armstrong.
Office is a mature turnkey desktop office suite for enterprise accounts (that sucks). These things are one step away from vapourware serving no one in particular.
Hype hype hype hype. AJAX hype AJAX.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
...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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
The very fact that there are 17 of them tells you that at least 15 of them are not competing with Office any more than a kid on a bicycle is competing with Lance Armstrong.
For now they are competing with each other, but at some point they will get into the way of Microsoft. Hope they are rife enough by then.
And remember that Lance Armstrong was a kid on a bicycle once too.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
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.
"will" is vastly different from the more correct "could possibly"
Don't hold your breath waiting for that, though.