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.
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!
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.
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.
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
At least theoretically, it could make life easier for IT depts. Instead of having to push a new version of Office (or other non-Web based suite) out to hundreds or users, they update one central app. Google could provide a box that's plugged into the network. Documents are automatically stored on company servers, so there's one point of backup. Collaboration is more seamless.
I don't see this being the perfect solution for home users. They're being developed on the Internet, but real revenue would come to selling to businesses who use their own servers for file storage instead of having their documents stored on Google or other third party servers.
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.
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
When I'm at home, OpenOffice does everything I need. When I'm anywhere else, I always use Portable OpenOffice from my flash drive.
In Italy, "Andrea" is typically a man's name. But, in this day and age, you can have your own strokes.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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
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.
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
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
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.
Today.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.