Challenging Microsoft on the Desktop

Dotnaught writes "As Microsoft moves to offer software-as-a-service with Windows Live, online companies are moving to challenge Microsoft on the desktop. In a decision that would have been seen as foolish a few years ago, file sharing and social networking company TransMedia plans to release desktop productivity apps (in conjunction with online ones) as lightweight Microsoft Office alternatives. Google, meanwhile, through its deal with Intuit, is colonizing desktop apps as it has done with browsers and search toolbars. Microsoft used to have a home field advantage on the desktop, thanks to Windows. Lately, operating system ownership is looking a lot less valuable."

Comments

Online apps

[insomniac8400]

There is not a chance in hell I would use an online app for something that runs fine on my local pc. Why add an unneeded security risk?

Re:Online apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Because every now and then vendors decide it's time to try and make desktop systems into dumb clients again and they need another kick in the ass to remind them of why it's a stupid idea.

Fear not. This too shall pass. Just like it did the last three times somebody tried it.

Actually, to be fair, online applications do make sense in a controlled environment such as a workplace where you can deliver a basic windows system and apps on-demand from any platform of your choosing (read: Citrix) to a group of people who don't need any control over their systems (the typical office worker). It's just that sometimes vendors get it into their heads that EVERYTHING should be like that and they try to push it, fail, and get fired, leaving the next batch of marketroids and accountants to come in, eventually develop this "novel" idea, and repeat the entire process again.

Re:Online apps

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

There is not a chance in hell I would use an online app for something that runs fine on my local pc. Why add an unneeded security risk?

There are four main advantages:

• Free and free upgrades - You don't have to worry about paying for this or keeping it up to date especially if you use multiple different computers.
• Accessible anywhere - you can work on the same files at home, work, the library, your cousin's house, school, or anywhere else without bringing a laptop or constantly transferring it to a disk.
• Reliability - Network services have real redundancy. If your hard drive dies, you might lose all or some of your work, depending how good your backups are (most people have none at all). If your house burns down, you might lose it all. Having it stored remotely in multiple physical locations is safer.
• Collaboration - With an online service you and a friend can both work on the same documents easily. With the right software, you can both even edit the same word processing doc simultaneously, with multiple insertion points/cursors. It is fun and useful.

For the most part, I agree that I won't be using these services and my company sure doesn't want me collaborating on work projects that get stored by a third party. My backups are good enough and I already host my own server on my workstation when I collaborate on documents (SubEthaEdit). This might, however, make sense for others I know who like to casually collaborate or who know how to use a Web browser and Web mail and don't want to be confused by anything else. To some people, the Web browser is the only application they really run. This might be fine for them and they don't care if someone else steals the Senior Citizen Arts and Crafts schedule, or the erotic sci-fi short story they are co-editing with their old college buddy.

Re:Online apps

[miskatonic alumnus]

Reliability - Network services have real redundancy. If your hard drive dies, you might lose all or some of your work, depending how good your backups are (most people have none at all). If your house burns down, you might lose it all. Having it stored remotely in multiple physical locations is safer.

Reliability - until your network connection goes down. Then it's pack up your computer and track down another connection.

Re:Online apps

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Reliability - until your network connection goes down. Then it's pack up your computer and track down another connection.

True enough, though those are different kinds of reliability. One is the whether your document will be accidentally destroyed and the other is whether you will be able to view/edit it at any given point. There are a lot of drawbacks to office applications as services as well, although in truth I hope all office suites or operating systems begin offering a remote server mode so that I can access the same data and applications from remote terminals. I still am in locations without internet access enough that I'd be unwilling to lose the ability to edit files locally, even without the privacy considerations. I'm also not to keen on having access to my half-finshed book DDoSed by some punk botnet operator.

Re:Online apps

[Digicrat]

Online apps are being developed with a lot of advantages over locally running applications, however only one of them can't be duplicated in a conventional application--network file storage of your files.

The only advantage to online applications is being able to access your files from wherever you are, from any computer that you choose. This is not however a feature that everybody needs, or that we need for every file. If you do use multiple computers however, it can quickly become frustrating maintaining synchronized copies of your files between systems, or keeping track of which computer has the latest version saved on it.

Instead of making an entire application online, they should simply provide the online file storage capability with a plug-in to easily integrate (synchronize) its usage into the productivity application of your choosing. Be that service premium or advertisement based (hmm, seeing an ad to open your own essay . . . ) it would make much more sense than an entire online office suite.

As with anything else, the minimalist approach is needed to maintain security with any network file system. Only place those files on the network (file server, online office app, w/e) that you will actually need to access from multiple places, and where possible limit access not just by password, but to known computers as well. Using an online app indiscriminately (or exclusively) for saving and editing all of your files is just asking for trouble.

Online applications do have their uses, but do you really want to be dependent on a network connection to finish writing that paper? For example, if your away from home or on campus and don't have an active connection for your laptop. On the other hand, being able to press open/save and having the file (if you choose) automatically synchronized with a network server iff your online could be invaluable.

Re:Online apps

[Digicrat]

It's not so easy to have network storage of a file from within an application outside of your local network without using external tools. My point though, is that allowing a service, like Google, to provide that network storage and tools to synchronize it, would be more convenient than maintaining your own file server (and more economical then keeping an extra computer on 24/7 just to serve files), and more useful than a full online application (not to say that the two can't co-exist).

If you save your files in a standard format, just about every computer has some file to access it (albeit to varying degrees of functionality).

The problem with online applications is that if your dependent on them, then your out of luck if something happens to your network connection. Even with Google Calendar, when I'm on the wireless network on campus sometimes parts of it become unusable because of a weak connection. Remote file storage allows you to just retrieve the data once, regardless of the quality of your connection, and allows you to cache your file/changes locally if your connection drops.

Online applications cannot provide this functionality. The various google apps autosave a lot to minimize loss of data, but if your connection drops, you can't really continue working with the data you already have downloaded.

Re:Online apps

[CommandNotFound]

Reliability - until your network connection goes down. Then it's pack up your computer and track down another connection.

True, but for more and more people, if their Internet connection is down, you might as well throw the machine away. Other than typing papers for school, what non-Net things do people do anymore other than play games (which are now network-dependent such as WoW)? There are still the Quicken hold-outs, but now that all banks offer online service and everyone takes debit cards, what's the point of balancing a checkbook on the PC?

At work, if the LAN goes down, again, the PC is basically a paperweight. No email, no CVS/Subversion/etc, no server shares, Windows freaks out with pauses here and there. A LAN outage usually causes such a fuss down the hall that even if you happen to have the necessary files open for local editing, you can't concentrate.

Now fast forward (n) years when Net reliability is as good as/better than telco service, and you're getting 10Mbit speeds regularly with low ping times. At that point, RDP or NX services are really nice to use, assuming AJAX doesn't continue to expand. No spam in your web or remote email client. No viruses in your word documents. Gigs of storage available from anywhere, and easily shared with others. I think once that type of computing becomes normal, it will be hard to imagine going back to a world where all your data was "trapped" in a box in your house, and you couldn't just log in anywhere in the world and work with your stuff or share/edit/view it with others.

OS owneship

[E IS mC(Square)]

>>Lately, operating system ownership is looking a lot less valuable.

This could not have been true-er. First, I substituted MS Office with OpenOffice*. After Google came out with spreadsheet and document solutions of its own, I do not even use OpenOffice anymore. What more, it does not matter anymore if I am on Windows XP or Ubuntu or Suse - as long as I have a relatively mainsteam browser with me, I am good to go.

*I am talking about my home environment where I do not user "Office" applications that heavily, and online solutions available to me satisfy ALL my needs.

Re:It has been MS office more than Windows for yea

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.

Many vendors could easily out-do MSFT in application space. MSFT did not get its marketshare and lead by simple technical superiority of its product or coding skills. It got it by better business tactics. Infact every flag ship product that is minting money for MSFT started out as a pale copy of some other better program. WordPerfect, QuattroPro/Lotus, Harvard Presentation Graphics, Dbase/Foxbase etc. Then the marketing muscle, clever tricks to prevent interoperability, agreements with vendors to throttle competition and naivity of its user base that confused interoperability with PC-compatibility got MSFT the market share and lead. If the OS advantage is removed and the playing field is leveled by demanding true interoperability and compatibility to standards, (standards not wholly owned and manipulated by MSFT) you will see what other vendors are truly capable of.

The key is Open STANDARDS. Do not confuse it with Linux/Mac/Unix or Open Source or Free Software or Gnu or GPL. If the users demand true portability of their data and their applications the playing field will be leveled. My docment, my macros, my scripts are mine. I want them to work whether I choose to run MSOffice or OpenOffice. Only when owners of the data assert their ownership and refuse to be locked into a particular vendor's format the playing field will be level.

Re:I cant wait to see how the compare...

[baadger]

"OO Writer tries to do everything on all platforms, and it became heavily bloated"

What about Abiword?

Re:I cant wait to see how the compare...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'd prefer FCKEditor on a simple web page than OO Writer. OO Writer tries to do everything on all platforms, and it became heavily bloated.

I don't mind OO writer, but I can see where others might. One thing I'd like to see that might help mitigate that kind of bloat is something like the system services on OS X. They've added spell checking and a dictionary/thesaurus that can be accessed by any application and a grammar checker is supposed to be built into Leopard. I also use a more comprehensive collection of online dictionaries, some macros and scripts, quick language translations, automated bibliography citations, and statistic summaries (word/page count etc.) on a regular basis. Since they are implemented as services rather than built into every program, I can add them or not add them for a given program without any bloat and build up a custom toolbox with just the features I need. Don't need a quick translation to/from german? Don't add it to your services. This sort of customizability goes a long way towards removing the bloat while still letting any given user have the features they want or need and keeps you from having to rely on multiple implementations of the same thing for different programs (I taught my dictionary that ICMP is not a misspelling in InDesign... I don't want to have to do the same in Vi, Pico, Word, TextEdit, Photoshop, Safari, etc.).

The market.

[jotaeleemeese]

The bad reputation they would create would kill them commercially.

And lets not even mention lawsuits.

Well, what the heck, lets do it: lawsuits.