Microsoft's Office Web Will Do iPhone, Linux, Mac

CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer reports Microsoft has clarified that its upcoming Office Web service will be available to users running Mac OS X and Linux, as well as from Apple's iPhone. The key to this cross platform-friendliness: Office Web will run in Firefox and Safari browsers, in addition to IE. Introduced last month, Office Web is a lightweight version of its Office suite that runs as an online service. I think it's time for Google to embrace OpenOffice.org to take on Microsoft head-on, as CW blogger Preston Gralla has argued for and described how to go about it."

Comments

Re:The real key is AJAX

[jamstar7]

Yeah, I really don't understand why people complain about MS Office when Open Office runs like a turd MS Office does not.

Back in the Stone Age, when Win98 was coming out, M$ decided to sell developer's licenses for $20K per. What you got for that 20K was info on two, count 'em, two system calls, one of which was for the keyboard interrupt, and an admonishment from M$ to not write your apps to the hardware anymore, write them to the OS. Of course, M$ had their inhouse people write to the iron, the undocumented hooks to the OS, and everywhere they could to save some clock cycles. End result, M$ software ran faster, was lighter, etc. At that time, Office used the renderer from Windows Explorer (as did IE, and just about everything else M$ put out with a house brand on it), while Word Perfect had to include its own renderer, print drivers, ad nauseum. If you wanted performance, you hauled out the Ralf Brown interrupt list, and coded some assembly to handle the interrupts directly to the OS & drivers.

Office still writes to undocumented system calls & interrupts, while 3rd party apps don't. And you wonder why OO is a 'turd' while Office isn't?