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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."
And here I was, thinking I could write a text document without Internet access. How stupid of me.
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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.
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.
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.
When I'm at home, OpenOffice does everything I need. When I'm anywhere else, I always use Portable OpenOffice from my flash drive.
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.