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Google vs. Microsoft On the Desktop

Posted by timothy on from the rules-of-engagement dept.

Michael_Curator writes "Gary Edwards, president of the now-defunct Open Document Foundation, helps sort out the challenges Google faces displacing Microsoft on the desktop, pitting the strengths of Microsoft's proprietary stack against the developer candy that HTML 5 represents."

6 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Gary Edwards? by bmo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hey, uh, wasn't he one of the ones that threw a tantrum (along with sam and marbux) when he didn't get his way with preserving Microsoft "dark matter" (undocumented RTF encoding) in ODF and then proclaimed that ODF is doomed to fail and all that nonsense when everyone told him to stuff it where it doesn't shine??

    I am shocked. Simply shocked to see that he's extolling Microsoft's "virtues".

    Nothing to see here, folks, just another softie trying to sabotage open standards by throwing chairs at it.

    --
    BMO

  2. Re:Take away the cloud by TheLink · · Score: 3, Informative

    > Java has webstart since 1.4 which uses JNLP...

    1) From a firefox user's PoV - it looks like "Opening a Program from a Website" which is what everyone keeps yelling at them NOT to do.

    2) It took me more than 5 minutes to download a simple program that just draws 3D spheres (from your link). Yeah I have a crappy connection, but I doubt "corporate" java apps are going to be small (and I've seen them being updated every few weeks - which means everyone has to redownload). They're fine over the LAN, but this Cloud thing...

    FWIW, I've tried the 4K java game stuff and many are great (and download quickly), but there are very few java programmers who can and will do that for "office/corporate apps".

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  3. Astroturf from Gary Edwards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Oh come on, Timmothy. Edwards has already been discredited for his astroturfing fake ODF news which he ran under the "Foundation" he's now moved his shit to Facebook and others. His foundation actively lobbied against ODF. He was a shill then, or at least one of Bill's "Useful Idiots", and he's the same now.

  4. Correction... by TheLink · · Score: 3, Informative

    Oh... looks like the 5 minutes was to download a new version of Java or something.

    And IE doesn't do that prompting, whereas Firefox does (at least on my setup).

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  5. Re:Take away the cloud by peragrin · · Score: 3, Informative

    The cloud is the new THIN client. The browser is the new OS for said thin client.

    while different browsers do implement things differently, there is a standards running the whole show and an approval process. previous thin clients were proprietary in one form or another.

    --
    i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
  6. Re:Take away the cloud by tclgeek · · Score: 3, Informative

    Surely you must have meant to say "... huge step forward for admins".

    What many (most?) application developers forget is that applications exist to make end users more productive, not admins, and there are precious few web based apps that are better than their desktop counterparts.