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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."

4 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Take away the cloud by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What I think would be best for Google would be to fork a version of OOo to include "Save to the cloud" support and integration with Google Docs. Along with integration with every e-mail client by using perhaps HTML e-mail or a plugin to enable Google Docs support. Create an iPhone app, plugins for MS Office, make it easy for anyone with any program to access and use Google Docs and it will succeed.

    --
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    1. Re:Take away the cloud by YttriumOxide · · Score: 5, Interesting

      True story though - I was showing a member of the younger generation a floppy disk that I had lying around, and the first thing he said was, "ah, it looks like the 'save' icon!". To many of the younger generation, the icon is an abstract concept meaning "save", not a representation of a disk.

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  2. Here's what Google needs by bogaboga · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To give Microsoft something to seriously think about, Google needs an OS on the desktop. Android is a good start in my opinion. There are some efforts in this direction already. The good thing is that Android eschews X, which is a pain to work with in its current form.

    Next, they will need [meaningful] applications that work no matter what platform one happens to be using.

    Third, targeting Microsoft must not be the aim, it must be the unplanned outcome. The aim must be tp "please" we the users.

    That way, Google will succeed on the desktop.

  3. Amazingly we should side with... Microsoft! by Nicopa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The standard desktop is better than Google desktop. Yes, everybody says, to put Google in a good light: "standard compliant" browsers, but that means nonstandard compliant mail, nonstandard everything else. We won't own software, we'll be always customers, dumb terminals, served from huge company's "clouds". Free software will be over, irrelevant. We won't be able to improve and modify our environment, we can't improve Gmail ourselves, there's no alternative/better/innnovative client for Gmail.

    Economic forces are taking technology down a terrible path. The past is better: a world of protocols, servers and clients. A common neutral space...

    The "portable" desktop, having your data everywhere should be solved by other means... I don't know, perhaps we should have personal servers, or at least we should contract personal servers from some kind of "personal server providers", which should be a standard and non-monopolistic thing. The "presence providers" envisioned by the XMPP protocol comes to mind...