Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft will offer an online version of Office 2010 for free. I have to wonder, will this remain free indefinitely? Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard, then go back to business as usual?" Probably a harder sell after Google's acquisition of DocVerse.
Hopefully this won't be bundled with a trojan like MechWarrior 4. THANKS UNCLE BILL.
Raters gon' rate.
As a number of people in the Seattle Times Forum have noted, using this "web based" Office product *requires* downloading and installing an .exe
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Why bother? I swear to god, I can do anything I want in sun (oracle? no hate here.) oo32 that I used to do in o2k3
Have you seen the OO32 release? My God! hahaha
I already collect text editors, but gosh darn I just can's see paying thousands anymore? Maybe you got a translator or some proprietary nonsense? I think we all would be wise to audit and revise what we really need.
Hey if you need Microsoft Office, more power to ya, the only thing I need now is a way to export their proprietary format to a real format which can be used in oo32 ;)
That first sample of crack is free too!
So now the PHB's in the upper offices find this and think it's great, and move everyone to this. Great! Until the day the network has problems. Or you have to finish that presentation but are temporarily sitting in an office with no network because yours is getting remodeled.
Two weeks ago my entire office was shut down for doing any real work, because all our work data is on a shared drive located on the network. Problem was that our office was being re-carpeted and the temp space they moved us into had NO network available.
On the other hand we did enjoy watching several movies at work that day.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
I see MS doing several things with this, including:
The free version builds understanding and credibility; especially if it integrates with teh desktop version. Once taht is done, migrate to paid for versions for businesses since the model is now accepted.
Working to a client server model (despite the "cloud" what's old is new again) and partner / acquire a company in that space to offer businesses a full suite of services.
If OfficeLive catches on, advertising will follow.
Ultimately, I think it's about building a tight eco-system around office / entertainment / information that allows them to capture eyeballs for ads and combat piracy so content providers sign on. This is but one more shot in that battle.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Remember that all Office applications embed a GUID in the document. My guess would be that the online version would as well. So your privacy is up for grabs.
Who cares if it's free, if you don't want it anyway?
Trying to do a cloud version of what they did with Office 97's monopoly underpricing against WordPerfect. We'll see how it works this time.
And at what point will there be a free windows version?
When they can get it to run in internet explorer.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
andHow about something like this?
"Well, you see, Google got hacked, they had the code to their global authentication taken, who knows what the hackers found there and what access they've got now... So, we decided to go with Microsoft instead."
Deleted
I can afford it. No return hassles. No sales tax. No need for a warranty. No elevated expectations. Can they do this with Windows?
Microsoft has no interest in OOXML. From Microsoft's perspective, it's deprecated. That's why they let it go. This is about XAML, upon which Silverlight is built. And XAML could be a very powerful thing.
A subset of XAML, XPS replaces Postscript. Any static page that can be printed can be stored as XPS. XPS is/will be the printer control language in Windows.
But XPS can also be displayed on screen (good bye Acrobat). XPS could be used to store any static document (goodbye Illustrator).
But the superset XAML is dynamic framework for rich internet apps (goodbye Flash).
XAML pages/apps can be designed in an Illustrator-like ExpressionWeb (goodbye HTML5 and CSS).
Of course, you can use the Office Web Apps without Silverlight and you can still see PNG images of your document. But if you should decide to install Silverlight I bet you'll find it a better experience.
Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue.
And at what point will there be a free windows version ?
YES, Microsoft is changing their business model big time. Steve Ballmer announced in his recent University of Washington speech that Microsoft is dedicating 70% fo their software engineers to creating cloud-based versions of their local software, and by next year it will increase to 90%. They were slow to adopt the cloud but plan to become a big contender in a short amount of time.
The speech is about 90 minutes long and is very interesting, for those who care to watch. He's quite a good speaker with a very good knowledge of the industry, and he handles people's questions directly and in detail. What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.
You have shit on your dick? And you're calling someone else a "faggot"?
The summary suggests this is a push to cement the OOXML standard and ultimately lock-in for MS Office. I don't really see why they need a free cloud-based offering to do that, MS Office has done extremely well at locking-in their standards in the past. TFA that it refers to also clearly argues this is MS having to compete with Google Docs, a much more evident profit motive. MS is also quoted that they see this as an opportunity to get at least a little income from people who, for various reasons, aren't currently paying for MS Office.
Whether it remains free indefinitely depends on how it works out, i.e. whether they think it is making more money (directly and indirectly) than doing something else. Stating the obvious but it's a silly question. Even Openoffice is freely supported by Sun for a profit motive: breaking the MS standards lock-in.
The Google quotes are on the money though. It's standard practice now for businesses to install Office on every machine while all the documents are saved to a network drive. This is a bit of a kludge really, people hunting through directories trying to find files is very cumbersome, especially since lots of people insist on saving works-in-progress to their desktop and only copying over when they're finished - and very often forgetting or not getting around to it.
but the short version is that it is a very long funky number that should be unique to whatever
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Only if viable alternatives still exist. Once they are put down, then it will be converted to a pay service.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard,
I doubt that's the case at all. When you're going against other software such as Google Documents, you either have to offer a better product, tight lock-in, or better pricing. Free is hard to beat, you've committed (on paper anyway) to open standards which greatly hobbles your lock-in, and so you're left having to offer at least a good chunk of the features the competition is giving that you currently are not.
Right now, Google Documents is offering a powerful new online service. I use Google Spreadsheet daily. It ain't perfect, but considering how new it is, it works amazingly well. It's easy to forget you're using a web browser when you just hit certain key combos for example out of habit, and to your surprise, they work perfect. Some of my spreadsheets can't be used with it, but the ability to collaborate online with others maintaining the same spreadsheets, at the exact same time, no emailing files back and forth all day or fighting over update locks on the LAN (or possible file corruption / data loss from an update war) it provides a unique, powerful, useful feature that my current use can't live without, and that MS Office doesn't offer. And my needs are far from unique. Everyone I tell about this is amazed and wants to try it because it gives them a useful option that MS Office just can't deliver.
This is it for Office, this is their shot to either keep or lose a market. It's not surprising in the least that they're rushing to get something available asap for online collaboration.
And if it were anybody but google, you can bet your last dollar that MS would have a whole herd of lawyers at someone's door with fistfuls of litigation trying to put a stop to it or at least stall it a year or two to give them a chance to catch up.
IMHO Google Documents is one of THE best things to come out of Google Labs. In the end, who knows, maybe MS will be offering a superior product. But there's simply no way this could happen without the necessary motivation.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Now, now women can also enjoy being anally penetrated doncha know.
you are converting the PDF to PDF/A right?
I'd say the likelyhood of being able to access those 25 years from now is pretty good.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
That first sample of crack is free too!
No, it ain't.
You want a sampling of MS Office?
There is the 2010 Beta. The 60 day trial on your new PC. The Docs for Facebook Beta...
Sales are quite good as well. MS Office Home & Student 2007 No. 1 in software sales. 1,231 Days in the top 100. Free upgrade to F&S 2010 if purchased before September 30.
"Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue."
Yes. And they see those days are passing away and moving on towards the second best: SaaS.
* Main advantage for them: they rent the services so if they carefully stablish their lock-in strategy they'll be securing their revenues forever; you won't even have the option to lock the computer and "freeze" it in time using your same old licenses for as long as it does the work (think a Windows 3.1 box with something that is still useful). They already tried to "rent" you the licenses but it didn't seem to work so well except, maybe, for big corps so they'll try to force you into their "you owe us a bill each month" this way.
* Main disadvantage for them: they'll have to expend for the computer power instead of you and they'll be easily fingerpointed when things wreak havoc.
All in all, it's a "second best". No wonder they...
a) Embrace it
b) But only when it's clear their "first best" is going nowhere.
That said, I've recently upgraded my version of OO.org to 3.2 on Ubuntu and it's significantly faster than then previous version.
Everything you describe already exists. What possible reason would people have to throw it all out and move to Microsoft't proprietary (and probably patented) standard?
Parent IS NOT "informative". You may not create new documents with this web app unless you have the EXE installed. The Parent is "Uninformed".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
"Desktop applications re-written in JavaScript suck, especially if they are made by Microsoft"
Sure I have trouble with the dozen desktop applications that MS re-wrote in JavaScript too. What were their names again?
Dude! Repeat after me: "<p> </p> and <br /> work on Slashdot". Geez!
Hitting [ENTER] works well too, and Slashdot will auto-convert it to the appropriate HTML for you. Choose your message options as "Plain Old Text" which also allows you to insert links, style it bold or italic, quote text, insert ordered or unordered lists, and so on. Who the hell manually enters paragraph or line break tags on Slashdot anymore?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Have you considered archiving virtual machines with old versions of Word along with the documents? I think that you can get old versions of Word for about $50 each on ebay.
Naw ... this one is like crack. Getting you hooked is "free" but once your documents are in its clutches, um, I mean file format, then your ass belongs to them.
Yup, I believe the same. I wonder what happened to /. "itsatrap" tag, I I kinda liked it as it separated in a clear way stories from Microsoft.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Firstly, if docx files were plain text markup (PP asserts that is "exactly" what they are), then any word processing package would be able to reproduce, exactly, the documents as they appear in MS-Word. Other applications are not able to do this, and the reason is because the file format is NOT plain text markup.
Secondly, nice distraction with HTML. Since when is the web supposed to be an archival medium?
GP was on-topic. The specification for OOXML includes references to previous .doc file formats, hence discussion of those is relevant in any discussion of OOXML.
I'd say your post is one-eyed to the point of propaganda -- were you paid to write it?
Microsoft will offer a product which does some of what Office 2010 does but which does not offer key features and does not offer 24/7 uptime.
There is no promise to support the product for any particular time, so based on past history, the product will change every 3-4 years and at least once per decade, prior data will become unsupported to lesser or greater degrees.
I really disliked office 2010. I can buy it for $10 if I want to. It was slower and it was unable to print a lot of my complicated office 2003 documents. On loading them into Openoffice 3.0, I noticed that office 2003 had allowed a lot of overlapping tables and graphic files which a test showed was the problem. Since neither office 2003 nor office 2010 DISPLAYED the frikkin graphic or table boundaries there was no way I could fix this issue in Office.
So I converted all the documents to OpenOffice. Took me about 8 hours for the first 100 pages.. then once i understood OO sections, I got it down to about 2 hours per 100 pages for the rest.
Still have to use Office at work. I can even buy a full copy for $20 for home use if I want. But really don't want to go back now.
I dislike the office 2010 ribbons and approach to formatting documents and working with tables.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If your smart you'll stay away from Cloud Computing applications a.k.a: ASP, SASP etc.
Keep your data and uptime reliability local.
-Eric
You're assuming that being called a "faggot" was supposed to be an insult. Re-read the sentence, replacing the exclamation mark with an ellipsis.
:)
I think you were just hit on by a gay guy with poor grammar
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OOXML (not to say that I'm claiming that .docx is exactly OOXML, it isn't) can contain proprietary binary blobs. Or has Microsoft gotten around to providing a "make sure that this document will be easy to transfer to other formats" button/preference. No? How surprising....
> Now how hard it is to do this, really depends.
Duh. So prove to us that it's easy and release, in the near future, an open-source renderer for .docx which is 100% compatible with the behavior of any given version of MS Office (my guess is that they don't all render it exactly the same, themselves).
<a href="not video">University of Washington speech</a>
Could you please post a download link (for viewing in my favorite video player)?
The URL I posted had a download link. I hope your favourite video player supports WMV.
download
The speech is about 90 minutes long and is very interesting, for those who care to watch. He's quite a good speaker with a very good knowledge of the industry, and he handles people's questions directly and in detail. What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.
I just watched it and it drags on a while. I wish there was a transcript. The meaty parts would not take more than 15 minutes to cover. Maybe this is what I need to do for a living now that the web is turning into TV: get a bunch of people to watch videos, make transcripts and publish them for subscribers to save time instead of having to watch the whole bloody thing :)
If people would actually format their documents w/ markup, then yes, that would be a workable assumption.... but they don't. People ``fingerpaint'' documents w/ font and style and size changes, sticking text in movable frames to work around their inability to control how Word will place text and for most things more complex than a basic memo you're left w/ an unintelligible wreck if the .doc is opened in anything other than the same version of Word w/ the same fonts and the same printer driver loaded.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Dude, you've got the link to the speech wrong. It's this one.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
I just watched it and it drags on a while. I wish there was a transcript.
A quick Bing search could have saved you a /. post.
Thanks, I will ask /. for a refund immediately.
You're lucky! The people I know don't know how to change fonts or styles and do all of their layout with the space bar. I need new friends...
Apparently you not aware of msft's history. Msft has proven itself, over and over, to be every bit as evil as the "whiny children" here seem to think.
BTW: it was a US federal judge, not a slashdot poster, that accused msft of using "Tonya Harding" tactics.
Given that there are emulators for the apple ][, which is over thirty years old now, it seems likely that there will be an emulator capable of running say Windows 2000 a couple of decades down the track. But I guess it would be better to archive the ISOs of the installation media than the installed image. There are other methods they could use: convert to PDF (can't edit document easily); Convert to OpenDocument (likely to mess up formatting etc.); convert to plain UTF-8 (mess up formatting even more). It hard to tell what is best without knowing more about their requirements (perhaps a combination of all of the above).
While I was pleasantly surprised to see office live supporting firefox, it sure is lame that it is only supported on windows or mac.
I still need to open and save microsoft project files from time to time, and Openproj is fairly buggy.
How does Microsoft Office Online relate to this.
That finger-painting is markup, though. Swiping a word to select it and clicking bold is no different than surrounding the text with <B>word</B> there's no technical roadblock to storing the document that way, either.
You're conflating document creation with document storage. Believe me, the document doesn't store the swipe or the click. It just stores regions with markup. The issue is will this markup be easily understood (just text, obvious from context like <B>word</B>), with external references to other media (stills, motion sequences) or will it be some binary munge snuggled around some custom text encoding, interleaved with image and chart data in *their* own formats so that no one has a decent chance of decoding (*cough* PDF *cough*) without a significant (and expensive) effort?
I really believe text markup is the way to go.
I've got old docs (from "Stylograph", ca. 1970's) in text form, complete with markup, and I can read them and know just how they were intended to look, even *outside* of Stylograph. were I inclined (I'm not) I could write an importer for a current formatting app, for instance a filter for Tex would probably be very short work. But I actually don't care how these docs look, I'm just interested in the content - family letters, old resumes, design proposals, etc. Which is entirely readable because... it's text!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion