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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."
"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."
That would be a great idea, if your goal is to hurt Microsoft's sales rather than high quality office software. This is a good example of how two faced people can be. The leg the open source community stands on is improving the offerings in specific types of software, yet somehow lose sight of it, thinking that eliminating an option is in everyone's best interest.
Whale
The key to Access is keeping what it is in perspective. Too many dopes out there are trying to turn Access into a catch-all solution and it wasn't developed that way. While it is crawling in that direction it's going to be a number of years before it ever bears any real fruit as something more than a low-end fast and dirty database appliance.
There's a reason that it's only part of the MS Office suite and not the MS Office suite in and of itself.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The last time they said the same thing for DirectX...
If a PHB implemented a mission critical app in Access poorly, I understand your wrath.
But frequently a project or analysis needs more capabilities than Excel provides, and the project isn't yet seen as business critical, and the timeliness or expense of getting IT on it is prohibitive. Access shines in these instances where a non-IT person can do some rather sophisticated data acquisition and analysis.
If years later you get called in to detangle an Access database that through feature-and-scope-creep has turned into an important business tool that needs a higher level of reliability, take it as a triumph of the common man and modern software, and as your responsibility and privilege to elevate this application to the next level.
that's true. XmlHttpRequest is indeed something that Microsoft has done right and that we should thank them for. and i think it's one of the rare examples showing that Microsoft can be a positive contributor to the web community. so it might actually be a good thing that Microsoft is trying to get into mobile web services. since they do not control the mobile browser market and can't just make everyone switch to IE, this will force MS to keep cross-browser compatibility in mind when developing these advanced web apps.
and as most web developers know, cross browser compatibility is probably one of the most difficult/laborious aspects of web design/development. and the reason for this is largely due to MS's intransigent habit of flouting established open web standards in developing IE. most web browsers are fairly reasonable when it comes to W3C compliance, and it doesn't take much to get a complex layout or application to work across Opera, Firefox, Konquerer, and the majority of common browsers. but IE is always the single browser that requires endless tweaking and inconvenient CSS hacks to get a cross-browser compatible web page.
now that Microsoft has to deal with cross-browser compatibility issues themselves, perhaps they will finally realize the insanity that is caused by their inconsiderate development philosophy. instead of disregarding open web standards and then wasting thousands of man-hours to work around the inconsistencies in browser implementations that they themselves introduce, maybe--just maybe--they will stop being a poor corporate netizen and work with the W3C rather than against it.
Anything Microsoft creates will not work with iPhone/Mac/Linux/etc. They will always sabotage the other systems whenever possible. Even if it works on release, an update will break it. Listening to anything Microsoft says is like believing an abusive spouse won't hit you again.