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Microsoft Rushes Out Office Web Apps Preview
CWmike writes "Today Microsoft launched a limited beta test of its Office Web Apps, the company's first public unveiling of its rival for Google's Web applications. Dubbed a 'technical preview' by Microsoft to denote that it's by invitation only, Office Web Apps will be available on the company's Windows Live site via a special 'Documents' tab. 'Tens of thousands have been invited to participate in the Technical Preview,' said a spokeswoman in a reply to questions. An analyst with Directions on Microsoft is quoted: 'This is earlier than I expected. I thought we wouldn't see this until the SharePoint conference at the end of October. Maybe the recent Google moves had some bearing on Microsoft's timing.' The reference was to Google's announcement Tuesday that it will offer online services next year, including Google Web Apps, that are specially designed for US government agencies."
I'm sure the annual rental fee will be so much cheaper (cough) than the $150 I spent to buy Office 97 (~$11.50 per year).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I have my own self hosted 'web apps'. I own my data, i keep control of it.
I would be wiling to bet if everyone got together and wrote some PHP based office suite that you could run on your own pc, or a basic web hosting service you pay for, it would give both google and Microsoft a run for its money.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Honestly, I haven't been incredibly impressed with Google Docs. The other day, a couple of friends and I tried to collaboratively edit a document, but each person would only think that one other person was editing the document, and the only way we could see each other's updates was to refresh the page. Furthermore, changes are only pushed out every 15 seconds from the Google server, making real-time collaboration difficult. If only Google Docs were more like Etherpad...
People who have been using MS Office since it came on a small stack of floppies are going to keep using what they know. Businesses with a large IT infrastructure invested in supporting Office are going to keep supporting what they know.
Meanwhile, people who jumped on the Google Docs bandwagon -- they're going to keep using what they know, too. A web-based office suite happened to be what works for them, and now they're invested in the Google way of editing and managing office documents, with no incentive to switch to Microsoft's system.
Microsoft is probably going to get as many takers on web-based Office as Google would have if they'd launched a desktop office suite.
Gradually, of course, as web technologies continue to grow, MS Office and the web-based Office will ultimately merge, the only difference being where they're hosted. But not for a decade, at least.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Resale is currently one advantage of the retail product manufacturer that is probably on the way out if MS has anything to do with it. Take any application that requires the activation key to be linked with a user name and a password, or explicitly forbids the resale of the software to a third party, and you have a product that can only be sold to one person.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitations_on_exclusive_rights:_Computer_programs "This one change by congress has resulted in the odd situation where software makers claim that purchasers do not own the software but rather only license it. The courts have split on whether or not the claim in the software agreement that a purchaser does not own the software is enforceable and thus require an additional license to use the software."
Further, "The law allows any copies that are created for the above purposes to be transferred when the software is sold, only along with the copy made to prepare them. Adaptations made can not be transferred without permission from the copyright holder."
Which is why any self-respecting software distributer wants to close that 'archival copy' loophole and require each instance of the software to perform an authentication with a unique CD Key.
A good example of the implementation is Valve and Steam. Here is a company that does digital downloads of the same retail product with the same limitation, they all have to authenticate each time the software is run.
Why would ANYONE use this? Google Apps is free. Open Office is free. Open Office exports to PDF, and does a damned good job, too. I send everything as a PDF now. I know it will look on their computer just like it does on my computer.
I really can't understand why anybody, particularly a business that wants to save money, would use any of Microsoft's products.
Linux Mint, Firefox, Pidgin, Open Office...... These are GREAT business tools. FREE. With FREE updates. That beat the pants off of every MS offering. Why is the MS hegemony so powerful? Some companies would save MILLIONS by switching, once the get through the rough patch of upgrading. But they're going to have to upgrade to Windows 7 and some bullshit new MS Office anyway.
I seriously, seriously don't get it.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Yeah, I've just noticed that I've got an invitation as well, so I had a look at the app. Sure enough, it's just HTML and JS. It does work nicely in Firefox and Chrome, too - I don't see any difference between that and IE version. In fact, it works noticeably faster in Firefox/Chrome than in IE8, which is readily seen when you try to highlight multiple cells by dragging. It's somewhat ironic, but I guess it gives strong incentive for IE team to seriously improve performance for the next release - as before this could be seen as propping Google agenda, while now there's a stake in it for Microsoft as well.
It's pretty interesting to poke around the thing with Firebug. The styling seems pretty decent from good markup accessibility point of view - for example, the Ribbon isn't hacked via tables, but it is rather an list with nested items which is styled to look as it does via CSS. On the other hand, Excel sheets are proper HTML tables/cells.
Sad part: it seems to do browser detection, since it won't enable "Edit" and "View" when I go there with Opera 10, nor it will work in Opera if I go there in Firefox and then copy the URL for a document opened for editing (linking directly to edit mode works in other browsers).
In the linked channel9 video, they specifically speak of using Silverlight for Word docs, so perhaps that's the only one that's using it. Little bits of information about Web Apps that were posted on the Net previously simply mentioned "richer experience with Silverlight" without many details. It's also worth keeping in mind that this is a "technical preview" (which is effectively "alpha" in MS parlance - something that's not necessarily feature complete), so it may be missing this particular thing.