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GDocs vs. ThinkFree vs. Zoho vs. MS Office
CWmike writes "Web-based productivity suites, once almost a contradiction in terms, have become real challengers to desktop applications. Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps. The question is: Are these three applications really ready to take on a desktop-based heavy hitter like Microsoft Office?"
Do you honestly think a business is going to allow its private correspondence to be handled over the Internet by one of these programs? Unless the company has nothing it would like to hide from its competitors, this isn't going to happen. There is too much fear of corporate spying.
I don't think that web apps will ever replace desktop apps for a while. First off, the issue of screen resolution. It is really easy to get OOo to work on my EEE PC even if it wasn't already installed, on the other hand, Google maps shrinks to a tiny little box. And even though decreasing the size in Firefox 3 makes it bigger, the font size becomes too tiny to even read. That's not to mention all the mobile devices that can have a ported version of OOo or Office to them with a customized interface to work well with each device while the web-based app doesn't cut it because it is too small. Will all these bugs be ironed out in the next 5-10 years, I would think so. But for now, no web app is ready to take on the desktop environment until it works well with various screen resolutions. (Google docs doesn't suffer from this problem, but Google maps does and I haven't tried either ThinkFree nor Zoho)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I spent a decent amount of time today reproducing an OO.o spreadsheet in Google Docs - still a long way to go there before it is a threat. The gDocs spreadsheet does some cool things for a web app - and I was impressed with some of the features (for a web app - see how I have to keep qualifying?) but it still doesn't come close to the desktop app.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
From TFA:
And because you work in a Web browser, they're cross-platform applications by default:
At work we are going through some issues because Apple decided to deprecate Quicktime for Java and now we are scrambling to find a replacement that will work on Windows and Macs. However, honestly writing cross-platform apps that play movies and deal with databases and lots of networked files isn't trivial to make cross platform, but it might be pretty easy if we went to the web. Is this the future direction for "cross-platform" applications?
Monstar L
Last time I had to use the Google Docs suite (3 months ago), it was to access a shared spreadsheet: each people had to fill in what food or drink they were bringing in at a party, in order to have some kind of co-ordination. The "shared document" concept is really nice, however the AJAX controls were killing the performance of my laptop from 2004. So I have trouble imagining doing work with such a solution - at least with my configuration.
Of course, it would be probably better with a newer computer, but I feel sad that an application which is recognised as being a hog such as MS Office runs better on my computer than Google Docs. (I took a glance at TFA, and it seems to imply that Google Docs is the fastest solution of all 3).
No, they need OOo. Of all the competitors to Office, OOo is the most used one. I know a good amount of people who use OOo and most are even Windows users, yet I know of no one that uses Google Docs, ThinkFree, or Zoho. I'm sure there are some users, but no where near as many as OOo.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The last time I tried the google docs spreadsheet (maybe 6 months ago?), it was ridiculously slow. I was about to post here and point that out, but then I thought I ought to check how the performance was today, in case it had improved. Well, I don't have any real data, but my subjective impression is that they must have made vast improvements in its performance since the last time I tried it. It really seems fine now.
The question in my mind now is how many people are really going to want this.
I teach physics at a community college, and I have a bunch of linux boxes in the lab alongside the windows machines. The linux boxes only have Ooo, and the Windows boxes have both Ooo and Excel. It's been interesting seeing how students react to being presented with a choice between Excel and Ooo. I actually have documentation in the lab manual for Ooo, and none for Excel. Nevertheless, the vast majority don't want to mess with Ooo. Even if they have never used a spreadsheet before in their life, Excel is a brand name they've heard, so that's what they gravitate toward.
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Emacs is never an option. SSH in from another machine and kill it from the command line.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Just give up already, you want to spend the money and buy a nice new Vista PC. Piano black, the ribbon, veterans love it and newbies grok it. It all works together so well it's like a dream. Opens your old documents and saves the new ones in a better than internationally accepted standards way. Worth every penny, $450 for the ultimate OS and $450 for the bestes Office suite, so your computer should not cost much less than $1000. Think of how it will train your children in the skills every office demands. Yeah, now your wallet is moving.
No calls now, I'm
If you knew more about emacs you would know that you don't need to ssh to quit the program. From within the program just type Control-Z ... then after the Stopped message type "killall -9 emacs"....
because it isnt sufficiently interoperable with MSoffice.
Wait a second... Lets see, I can save an item in OOo and I can open it up in Office and still get all the text just fine. I can use a saved file from Office and open it up in OOo and still get all the text just fine. However, I can take a saved file from Office 2003 and open it up in Office XP which should be compatible, but wait... The file from Office 2003 looks totally different on Office XP! But aha! I have Office 2003 installed on my laptop... But wait! It looks different on there then on the Office 2003 at work!
Face it. Even Office isn't good at being sufficiently interoperable with Office. But that hasn't killed Office... Yet.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm guessing these are entry level physics classes? 111 or 101 perhaps? I don't mean anything bad at all, because the last time i had a physics class no one was using MS Office stuff at all. Pretty much everyone writes stuff up with LaTex.
Just for humor's sake, you should teach a lesson one day about how Microsoft software makes your intelligence fall. I'm sure it's pretty easy to come up with a reasonable formula for it's rate of change. Even better, play the Balmer videos. Everyone loves those. :-P
Same objection I always had with GMail.
Google is then in charge of your data.
I don't care if google is staffed exclusively by Ophanim (closest rank of angels to god), I'm not willing to trust a third party with my stuff, and neither should any self respecting company.
sudo rm -f `find / *emacs*`
Nuke it from root. It's the only way to be sure.
One of my teachers in school required us to submit assignments in LaTex. There was quite nearly a full scale rebellion. I was pissed off enough that she required us to use a program of her choice to generate a PDF that I simply didn't bother to learn. I just OO.o, same as always, and exported to PDF. The marker didn't know the difference.
The simple litmus test: Would you submit a resume using those tools?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
LOL...
Assuming that you (the AC) are WillyHill, you are becoming as disturbing of a thought as Twitter himself is.
The links above are circumstantial evidence of the ownership of each account.
WTF?
Epic shill threads
FTW?
Due to trolling, this journal entry has comments disabled. If you would like to report a new account, just post on one of my open JEs
TFW?!
Are you building a civil case over this? Or are you going to start a Not-For-Profit Twitter Reduction Organization, Or are you just trying to invoke some sort of Slashdot method to delimitate user accounts, perhaps a mandatory subscription? Is there a newsgroup, or a website in the making?
You can't stop "Twitters" by imposing more rules, you just make them more devious, and by creating such "following" of him/it/them you are solidifying his position as The Most Infamous Troll On Slashdot and most likely if not certainly making him more eager to continue, notice how he seems to be picking up the pace with new accounts? there's what like 8 or so vvillyhill/wiIIyHiII/wlliyhill accounts now... you are feeding the problem, unless of course, you actually are the problem, and a little more adept shilling method, pretend to combat your own trolling or something.
How hard is it to mod him down, or to roll the wheel on your mouse past his comments?
Bad article, bad greenlight. Office is way beyond any of the web based 'productivity' apps.
I just visited the home page of each of the three alternatives mentioned, and read their own words about what features their word processors offer. It was hard not to laugh: they actually describe things like being able to save your files and collaborate with others as features. I'm not sure any of them even mentioned a single real word processing feature anywhere on their list. And while some of the on-line features they plug have some merit — though I suspect many of them are really only gimmicks of little real world value — of course being on-line comes with some major downsides in the security and reliability areas.
Then I read TFA. (Yes, really. It's quiet night. ;-)) I think this quote is the most telling:
All three of these word processors are capable of tasks such as formatting the typefaces, placing and sizing graphics, arranging paragraphs, and setting up tables. But only ThinkFree offers the really sophisticated features, such as letting you format a hanging indent.
(Emphasis added)
If adding a hanging indent is sophisticated, these things aren't even glorified text editors, never mind word processors. Where's my real-time word count and spelling checking? My document structuring and organisation tools? My cross-references, footnotes and bibliographies? If they're going to pimp my pages, can I at least have a smart H&J algorithm and use my professional grade OpenType fonts? There is more to a word processor than basic text editing and the occasional picture or table!
I think it's safe to say the guys in Redmond don't need to start throwing chairs. The on-line apps aren't even Word from nearly two decades ago, yet.
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None of them are all that great. Do Google Apps do everything Office does? No, clearly not. But frankly, I think Office is overrated. Granted, my copy is a couple of years old, but I just don't have much use for it. I open most things in OpenOffice, but even then, I'm converting a lot of it to text. I find all office suites ponderous and bloated, more by feature creep than any particular flaw in coding. Send me text, and I'll put it in Scribus or LaTeX.
Google Docs should be thought of as a highly-collaborative text editing environment, not a word processor. It looks exceptionally good when you look at it that way.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Emacs is never an option. SSH in from another machine and kill it from the command line.
Why use another machine? I'm sure EMACS has an SSH client built into it somewhere...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Still, if I'm going to type anything for printing I'll use Word. If I'm going to do anything that doesn't need to be continuously shared, I'll use one of the office apps. If I need a spreadsheet of any complexity, I'll use Office.
I'd much rather see Google & Zoho polish the features they do have (Zoho still can't print in Landscape format, has nothing close to WYSIWYG printing, and frequently locks. Google has no locking to prevent users from overwriting each other (last time I tried it...). Don't bloat till you've got the skeleton working.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Emacs is never an option. SSH in from another machine and kill it from the command line.
And then nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
It is not exactly the same but years ago we all computed with terminals connected to a program that run over the network (well, not all, but a good portion of us did). This is the same thing, for the most part, as the computing in the cloud bit of today. I say that unless your organization is already capable of running thin clients and reliably using networked applications than you probably shouldn't base your businesses productivity and communications on cloud level software. With an installed application you are subjected to fewer potential problems in my opinion. Even if it is Microsoft's Office suite you're subjected to their EULA and the length of time that they maintain the product and file formats. With an online suite you're subjected to all of those plus connectivity, privacy policy changes, business plans that don't model your own meaning that they may go out of business, and more. The ends don't justify the means in this case.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I work at a non-profit. While we use Office internally, some of the groups are shifting to Google Docs for community outreach. Why? Because there's no software to buy, information can be shared between remote and local users, updated instantly.
I've tried using Word's version tracking features and they tend to fall down. Google Docs will allow simultaneous editing but it's auto-save feature needs work. It saves every 30 seconds so you can end up with a thousand edits that don't really mean anything. Two features that need to be added: the first feature is a data edit session. If Joe reviews the document, he can open a session, make his changes, and close the session. So when I want to see what Joe did, all I have to do is hit a filter that says "Highlight Joe's last session." Or maybe I could say "highlight all of Joe's changes." The other feature that would be great is versioning. After I finish my first draft, I promote the document to second draft and continue editing. Then I can track changes between draft 1 and draft 2, 3, etc, Joe's contributions between draft 1, 2, etc.
At this point in time, Excel is the only Microsoft application I actually like. Google has a way to go to equal that. But for data aggregation, Google Spreadsheets work just fine. Anyone can open the sheets, enter data, and I can copy and paste into Excel for anything more. Nobody has to own Excel or download anything, they can enter the data from any desktop in the world. Word gets grudging credit as the only good option for funky printing requirements. I haven't tried out OO for this yet, it may be up to snuff now.
Where Word really chaps my ass is that there's been no improvements in what's broken since I first started using it. Styles is borked, formatting is borked, there's little flexibility in layouts, tables are buggy, trying to size ANYTHING becomes an exercise in frustration because you cannot position by pixel but by arbitrary jumps, etc, etc. None of these problem areas are addressed, we're just buying the same old broken code with new turd polish each and every version.
Microsoft is still the king for now but there are dozens of companies and open source projects in the race to smoke their asses. If they keep standing still, they're going to be in it like kippers. Office 2007? Fucker can't even share user resources properly. If I want to share contacts from 2007 to someone with 2003, I have to go onto his fucking machine and add myself in as an alternate mailbox. I have to go into tools, mail servers, exchange, add it in. WTF? And the stupid mail invite that goes out when you invite someone, nevermind getting permissions proper when it does things automagically. Grr!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
We tested and use Zoho and Google; both had serious collaboration bugs:
* Users could overwrite each other's others changes without knowing it. For example if Amy edits a cell (in the spreadsheet app) or text (in the word processor), and the update doesn't reach Bob in time, Bob could overwrite the same data with his own.
* Edits sometimes are not updated on other users' sessions quickly enough or, in some cases, at all.
Before you count on it for serious work, beware. It seems like a fundamental issue they should have anticipated on day one.
Agreed. Nothing which is remotely hosted, unless it's hosted on your own server, will ever be a serious office application.
Proprietary information is only proprietary as long as access is controlled.
Anyone who thinks a web-based office application is a good idea does not understand TANSTAAFL.
I just got an email from a google developer working on google docs who saw my comment on above, and was happy that someone had noticed the improved performance. He says they started a feature freeze a few months ago, and spent the last few months working exclusively on performance.
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I run my own one man IT business and all and I really mean ALL of the documentation is handled through Google Docs.
It is great for collaboration purposes. Version management build in and to top it all off, I never have to worry about access or backup! Especially not with Google Gears that ensures access even when the internet is down (Never happens here)
Now google docs is indeed not too great if you want to do Desktop publishing which is what some people seem to think MS Word is for. I do need the odd picture included in my documents but I wrote a little application to streamline that process.
I made it available for free on my Google site of course. My program Pastry will archive every bitmap you copy and allow for easy upload to Google or anywhere else for that matter. Have a look on: http://vandinther.googlepages.com/pastry
This article/discussion is not Open Office vs MS Office. It's about whether web based apps are ready for prime time. I know /. commenters are expected to go off the headline only, then spout their opinions without regard to validity, but come on. At least keep your fanboi comments related to discussions that pertain to Open Office. (BTW, I use it, I just don't think it's better than MS Office, only cheaper.) This isn't even open vs. closed discussioin. It's web 2.0 vs locally installed software. Webapps vs (PickOne: MS Office, WP Office, or OO)
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
the parent company of the company where i work recently invested in a sharepoint installation. i haven't yet used it, but i saw an attempt to demonstrate it. that was quite embarrassing.
I was pissed off enough that she required us to use a program of her choice to generate a PDF that I simply didn't bother to learn.
Seems you completely misunderstood what she was pretending: my guess is that she wanted you to learn another point of view in the field of documents creation.
I just OO.o, same as always, and exported to PDF. The marker didn't know the difference.
Just because she didn't say anything does not mean she didn't know. She knew most of you would not use LaTeX.
This course I've driven a final career project, and convinced the boy to use LyX (I helped him installing it on windows, which is pretty easy by the way). At the beginning it was tricky for him, but after a couple of days he was comfortable. At the end he recognizes how much work he has avoided respect writing his work on MsOffice.
The point is that his mates were puzzled about how elegant his work looked like. I've been reviewing some of the works and none come close to LaTeX look -further, there are some horrible looking ones-. Ensuring style consistency is pretty hard at tools so elastic as office packages are.
I'm not sure if you knew this or not, but Word actually has had "Track Changes" feature for quite a while - I agree it's not the greatest of implementations, but it does the job - especially in smaller office situations like you describe above.
Also, if you have your document on a shared drive and someone else is editing it, you have the option of letting Word notify you when the document is available again.
That might help your boss next time.
Twitter has a long way to go to be the most infamous poster on slashdot. The worst and hence most infamous trolls on slashdot are the paid to post losers.
How do you know they are paid by the Uncle Sam/Israel/RIAA/CIA/FBI/Microsoft etc?
I often defend all of those organizations (and much worse ones) just for shits and giggles.
No one pays me a cent.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I also think that Google Docs is a very good solution for some scenarios such as small non-profits. I work with coffee coops and one of the biggest problems is maintaining machines running because they all want to run Windows OS and Office... from what I've seen, in the international arena Microsoft is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to any real development. Organizations that are strapped for resources spend too much time and money on maintaining their Windows crippled boxes.
One of the things that I have done is to convince a few of them that they need to shift to Ubuntu, and to start using Google Docs (OO if not connected to the internet).
So far one of the complaints I've heard is that the machines running ubuntu make them nervous because they are not crashing regularly... as if that was a bad thing. Also, by using Google Docs they have their vital documents backed up and not at risk of getting lost if the machine they are using gets damaged or stolen (there have been significant flooding in the last few weeks... at least the data is safe).
Most of the world does not have the unlimited resources that US companies seem to have. Coffee growers in the global South have incomes that are well below the $4 bucks people spend for a Venti Caramel Machiatto (whatever that is... ), sharing their meager incomes with Microsoft should be considered a crime against humanity.
So with this in mind, I think that any solution that is open source and improves the day to day experience people like the farmers I am working with, is the best route to take (I have not dealt with crashes now in a few weeks, nor do we have problems with viruses, malware, etc.)
The only problem I have with web based apps, and one of its major stumbling blocks, is it is useless without an internet connection. Lose your connection, lose your productivity. No amount of portability can make up for that simple fact.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Get real. Difference between you and "self respecting companies" is that they don't have a stash of porn they're trying hide.
"Self respecting companies" usually have a CFO whose job it is to make sure that money gets spent wisely. Let's consider having you or some other geek team manage my corporate data vs. doing it at Google:
Security:
Geek: encrypts stuff, holds me hostage
Google: Google datacenter security
Risk:
Geek: let's face it, would sell his mother (never mind the customer database) to get laid
Google: Google approach to risk management
Litigation & discovery:
Geek: will send lawyers whatever he's been asked to by his boss, and maybe a bit extra "by mistake"
Google: Will respond to specific and valid legal requests
Service cost:
Geek: can never have enough (hardware, salary, perks, etc.) can't bother to come in wearing a clean t-shirt
Google: $50 a year. Regardless of volume or usage. Upgraded continually.
I won't even mention the fact that you already trust a number of companies with your data - unless of course you've dug your own ditch and laid your own fibre between offices.
Google is staffed by asswipes like every other company. Unlike your employer, they just manage that risk.
Google has tried to get around this with Google Gears. When installed, it lets you use Google Docs offline. Sadly, it doesn't support all browsers (I know that it works in Firefox, not sure about IE or Opera, pretty sure that it doesn't work in Safari).
While not an ideal situation, it works. You do have a point, though, in that if you don't have an internet connection you are pretty screwed if you need to access your data that is only stored online.
Hopefully as Wi-Fi becomes more ubiquitous this will be less of an issue, but not much else can be done about it really.
This is way off-topic, but given the series of posts you've made, I think it needs to be said here.
Sometimes, a course of study at a school is designed by people who are actually smart, and they weave general knowledge of the field and awareness of the possibilities carefully throughout the various classes on more specific subjects. When you're taking such a course, almost by definition it is unlikely that you have yet gained the skill and experience to appreciate this.
Your attitude implies that you think you know better than your teachers, and that you insist on making your own judgements on the merits of what they teach. While both self-driven learning and healthy scepticism can be good things, you might like to stop occasionally and ask whether you are missing something that someone more experienced is trying to show you. From your posts here, it will be very clear to many of us who do work professionally that you have missed an opportunity to learn several useful things here: not only LaTeX, a widely used tool in its own right in some fields you might work in later, but also the experience that learning a new tool often doesn't take as long as you think, for example, and perhaps a few practical skills for preparing a good formal document. And you have given all this up just because instead of taking the enormous 5–10 minutes required to learn a new tool recommended by your teacher, you have stubbornly insisted on doing something your own way. If that is your mindset, you are pretty much doomed in any future career you might wish to pursue in the computing field.
You do not know everything. Suck it up, learn a bit of humility, and make the most of opportunities to learn about stuff, because you will probably never have the same kind of opportunity again and you will regret it if you don't. And please don't think I'm writing this just to patronise you. I used to be like you, and so probably did a lot of the other posters here, and I bet every one of us would take a different approach if we could do it again.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.