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Google To Steal Office Web Apps' Thunder?
Barence writes "Google has stepped up its assault on Microsoft's productivity software with the acquisition of a start-up company that allows Office users to edit and share their documents on the Web. The search giant has acquired DocVerse for an undisclosed sum. Product manager Jonathan Rochelle said DocVerse software makes it easier for users and businesses to move their existing PC documents to the cloud, and that Google 'fell in love with what they were doing to make that transition easier.' Microsoft said in an emailed statement that Google's acquisition of DocVerse acknowledges that customers want to use and collaborate with Office documents. 'Furthermore, it reinforces that customers are embracing Microsoft's long-stated strategy of software plus services, which combines rich client software with cloud services.'"
What isn't in Microsoft's press release and what I'm sure Google is actually doing is making it easier to get your Information out of Office. Whittle away, bit by bit.
Shh.
Come on, bub. Show us some of these "real web apps". I sure as fuck haven't seen them. Every web app I've worked with has been shit.
Google's web apps are good compared to most other web apps, but pale in comparison to real desktop apps. Thunderbird is much nicer to use than GMail's web UI. Even Outlook is more functional, and Outlook is a piece of crap itself.
God have you seen google's idea of powerpoint?
No, but since I have to sit through hours of badly presented Microsoft Powerpoint presentations, nothing can be worse. If Google breaks powerpoint to the point where presenters have to present data using whiteboards, OHPs, movies, handouts, and good old fashioned oratory, then count me in.
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English Haiku is
It's the other way on. Developers hate web applications...
Both wrong. :)
Developers hate them and users hate them.
Unfortunately Marketing departments, bean counters like them. (Neither of these groups actually use them of course, but based on their paradigm shifting synergistic sizzle coolness 2.0 and low support costs per table 16-1 in Appendix PHBs couldn't possibly resist foisting them onto their users even if they wanted resist. (But why would they resist... overseeing the deployment of paradigm shifting synergistic coolness that would save the company money on paper is what PHB promotions are driven by. Its resume gold.
How do I get Google Office to load in the less than .5 seconds it takes the various Office apps to start on my local system?
What Office apps are you using? I'm using Open Office and I just opened the spreadsheet app. it took exactly 11sec to open and present a blank spreadsheet.
On the other hand loading a 2-page long existing document in Google Docs just took 2 seconds (that's with a trans-national proxy through my company's gateway in the middle) in a browser that had not previously visited Google Docs (and thus had no cached JavaScript, etc.)
My experience with MS Office is that it's faster than OOo, but slower than Google Docs.
However, both MS Office and OOo speed up significantly once you've already loaded them once on most platforms. Why? Because they stay resident, taking up system resources. You can do the same thing in your browser with Google Docs. Just keep a tab open with Google Docs and all of your documents will come up faster.
The real bottom line isn't a matter of benchmarks, however, it's that the original poster's claim that Google Docs was "bloatware" ignores the fact that it's an implementation of a very large system which is at least as bloated in every fully-featured implementation.
I really think you've started with a flawed premise.
I've actually found that users LOVE web apps if they do what they're intended to do AND the company is willing to move beyond the IE6 sphere of stupidity.
I was working for a media company and they deployed a web app that made it easier for journos to submit stories, the only desktop app required was used by the editors. No longer did they have to log in to a VPN and run a very network intensive publishing app via satellite from remote places just to submit the story. They could submit stories written in say notepad and copied & pasted into this app. The same company uses many other web apps that users like. The only time there's a complaint is when the developers screw up and break the app. This happens with ALL apps (same publishing app mentioned before broke almost weekly and it is not a web app).
There's many other web apps (including Google Documents) that are giving users a fresh look on web apps. While I can understand people's hesitations, I remember the good old days of crummy web apps crashing your computer and chewing processor time like there's no tomorrow, I do feel that we'll see a fundamental shift from local to cloud apps in the near future by choice. My father at 67 has moved entirely to OpenOffice with Google Docs sync as he writes a lot on the road. For me, this is a sign of just how little hold Microsoft really has on the end user market.
It seems the ONLY people I see complaining these days are people who work in IT. I'm not sure if these people have just not spoken to their users in 10 years, the web apps they deploy are crap, or that they fear their own expendability in the coming years.
Then you aren't implementing AJAX properly. You can tell when a request is launched, when its started its return, and when the information you've requested is successfully back. Albeit, this is not an easy thing to learn - but once you've got it down it makes Web Apps a whole lot easier.
When you've got a network issue - it's going to affect your Desktop App or your web app. Latency is latency - the only difference is a desktop app will wait for the network, a web app you have to tell it to wait (or you can tell it to do something else, if there is other stuff to do).
I find Web Apps easier to debug, because its running off of a single server, not the client. So "duplicating" the error is as easy as repeating the steps the user did. I do not have to make sure my environment is configured exactly like theirs.
Perhaps your dissatisfaction falls into the way things are implemented in your work environment. I get the feeling YOU didn't choose the "CSS, PHP/Python/Java and Javascript backending some database " but someone else did, and now you're stuck maintaining (meaning cleaning up) their mess.
I have never had a real issue using AJAX with an ASP.NET front end, C# or VB back end, handling an Oracle/MySQL Database. Everything within that architecture is designed with the others in mind - and it makes programming a dream.
And if your company is willing to dish out the cash for some AJAX user controls - like Telerik or something, you don't even have to deal with AJAX all that much, and most of your code is written for you.
This sort of thinking is the same as what inspired the Newsweek article from 1995 which was discussed earlier today. That article predicted that the internet would never catch on because it was hard to use in its current form. You have to remember that the platform is going to continue to improve and be refined.
Already, the Google apps are easy to use for basic tasks. They load quickly, and while they may lack certain features and polish that can be found in the latest version of Office, they are quite usable. They're only going to get better, and browsers and PCs are only going to keep improving. There isn't much that can be added to Office for 95% of users, so the gap will close.
The biggest advantage to web apps is file management. I don't have to consider where my files are stored, or which computers have access to them. I don't have to worry that I have two different versions if I worked on a file remotely. I don't have to worry about what happens if my hard drive crashes. Users hate worrying about those things.