Google Docs Aims At Microsoft Office Live

mikesd81 writes "Channel News reports that Google took an important step forward Monday in its rivalry with Microsoft Office Live, reporting that Google Docs will allow users to edit word processing documents offline. Google said users of its Google Docs word processing application can use Google Gears to save and then edit documents without being connected to the Internet. 'The offline capability will be limited to word processing documents, though the company plans to add it to spreadsheets and presentations in the future.'"

Comments

consortium needed

[suck_burners_rice]

Why isn't a consortium forming between Google, Apple, and OpenOffice.org to give all three office suites the capability to edit each others' documents with 100% formatting and content compatibility, and 100% support on Windows, Mac, Java, and X11 based *nix environments? Each one of these organizations is formidable by itself, able to fight Microsoft off a bit here, a bit there. In the end, though, they're each a 600 pound gorilla, and Microsoft is an 800 pound gorilla. But these three organizations together, a team weighing in at 1800 pounds, would crush Microsoft like an ant.

Re:consortium needed

[nguy]

Anything that hurts Microsoft and weakens their monopoly influences, leads to a better market for Apple to compete in.

Apple made a deal with Microsoft and they have Microsoft Office on their platform. That's something that helps them a lot in competing with open source desktop operating systems. Why would they want to lose that advantage by supporting ODF?

They can also qualify as a vendor for purchases in the future that require ODF (as some government agencies are now moving towards)

They can do that with NeoOffice.

If Apple as a company was trying to be incompatible with OpenOffice they would not have added ODF support to TextEdit.

Makes perfect sense: they want people to be able to read the occasional ODF file, but they don't want people to strengthen ODF by fully supporting it.

I disagree with this. Rather, I suspect Apple has not prioritized ODF and created their iWork applications based upon their own format for convenience.

Well, you can "disagree" all you want, but it isn't born out by the facts. Apple has spent a lot of time and money developing two different XML formats for iWork when they could have just adopted the ODF format.

Re:Rivalry?

[LLKrisJ]

OpenOffice is the only thing within striking distance of MS Office And even then, it often leaves much to be desired. I honestly applaud the efforts to come up with an alternative to MS Office. Because although MS offers a lot of functionality with it's software (You can produce some nice, stylish docs, as long as they stay relatively small) it also contains some absolutely incomprehensible faults;

1) Why the hell doesn't Outlook provide decent IMAP access??
2) Why can't I copy my Word2007 equations to Powerpoint???
3) What is up with that crap Master Document implementation
4) ...

That said though, OO can only compete with Office it it offers at least full support for all features in MSO. That means, opening doc or docx in OO would not lead to layout corruption, etc... Until now, that still is the case. Especially the OO Powerpoint counterpart I find particularly horrible.

I have been watching OO for a long time (4 years), but it seems bewildering to me that with current adoption by some governments and the large open source community, development of OO still seems to be progressing so horribly slow.

In the meantime I will stick to LaTeX and my trusty WinEdt for big docs...

Re:Ok, uhmmmm duh?

[flappinbooger]

Online / Offline isn't an issue.

Most of the time.

It's that 1% to 2% of the time, IE on an airplane, at the airport (without wifi) or when the ubiquitous high speed internet at home or at the office is mysteriously down due to a)The backhoe effect b)bad storms, flooding, hurricane, c) maintenance, d) ISP Messup, e)your modem gets hit by lightning e) gremlins

That 2% of the time, which could be 10%, or 1%, really stinks because it never happens at a convenient time. Offline would be good then.

My wife uses google calendar EXTENSIVELY. It really stinks for her when the internet is down at home (not very often, but like I said, she uses it extensively) because if she needs to check something on the calendar, it's ... it's ... GONE! We now have internet enabled phones so now if the main intarweb tubes are down we can still get online. Whew! I need to install a local calendaring app for her and have it sync'd with google calendar. I saw a nice article in maximum PC which showed some real easy steps to do it right.

(I know it's april 1st, but I really do have a wife)

Hybridization

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I really think hybrid applications that are both traditional and Web apps are going to be the way of the future. Local applications don't allow you to edit from any machine, are not automatically kept up to date (payware), and don't allow developers to easily leverage ad revenue or subscriptions. They are not as simple for collaboration and publishing to the Web. They are not as easily targeted to all platforms because of lack of standardization for running applications across OS's

Web apps are reliant upon a network connection, don't provide the security demanded by some use cases, and are not good at finding geographically close users. Performance is limited by network throughput and latency.

Really in a free market the direction of development is almost certain to go to apps that connect to internet services or apps that are also internet servers. They both come down to the same thing, just differing in the emphasis on decentralization or centralization. Given that the network is the more common limiting factor today (especially in the US and the third world) hybrid apps like this offering are probably going to be very big, very soon. The only thing holding this back has been Microsoft's ability to cripple Web technologies and their monopoly influence in the office suite market.