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."
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.
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.
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.
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)