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.
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 ;)
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.
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?
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!
andMicrosoft 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.
My take on it: they decided to do it because Google's doing it, and they don't want to get "left behind". Then they came up with a plausible-sounding business case for their scheme.
Personally, I find any "office suite" useless for the simplest of tasks. Why do people think their to-do list or 1-page memo requires anything more complicated than plain text?
You have shit on your dick? And you're calling someone else a "faggot"?
Man, you must be really, really new here.
This is exactly the problem (and the same facile response) we've been coping with since the mid-90s, and I can tell you from experience that things are never as simple as you describe.
Let's take one client I'm working with right now. They're a national institution, responsible for archiving court documents in perpetuity. That means, effectively, forever. Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup (e.g. XML) following an open, formal and workable specification whose definitions are slightly more robust than "Do this formatting the way we did in Word 97" and which consists of slightly more than dumping blobs of binary data inside tags, we might stand a chance. It would still be a bit of an ask, but in the worst case scenario, we could probably infer (or ignore) the parts that puzzled us most.
Document formats matter because a great many of them -especially those produced by the public sector- have historical value and need to be preserved for a very long time.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
Yes, that was exactly the intent when MS created its own proprietary document formats. There was a time when WordPerfect was happy to convert to and from Ami Pro, when Star Writer exported just fine to Word. Microsoft changed all that by relentlessly leveraging compatibility to feed their revenue stream.
Agreed. That's why I mentioned both Adobe and Word formats in the same sentence. I don't think either one is particularly appropriate (although PDF as a published specification is a great deal easier to work with when doing document conversion).
That's hard to believe, and not entirely relevant. What I'm talking about -as a minimal scenario- is a situation where the original software just doesn't exist any more. Twenty-five years ago in 1985, Word was something called Multi-Tool. I sincerely doubt one of its files would open in Office 2010 without significant effort from a developer.
Nobody. That's exactly what we do. The problem is that we work with legal documents from over 20 countries and hundreds of different sources. We have a limited amount of development resources (mostly just me) and we need these documents to be available forever, effectively. If people could actually settle on a standard that really was a standard, if people could actually agree to look slightly farther down the track than their own desktops, we could actually spend time building new searching capabilities, ontologies and frameworks to make the data way, way more useful than it is today.
Instead, I spend all my time dealing with half-assed, unstructured formatting brought about by the fact that people are content to use a second-rate implementation of a deliberately obfuscated format.
Other vendors may be guilty of this, too. But Microsoft has done it longer and more effectively than most.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
That complaint about .DOC is very correct. Just a couple weeks ago someone at the company I worked for received a Word 2.0 document and was asking for my help opening it as he only had Word 2010.
Those formats are very temporary in their usability.
To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.
PDF was made in 1993 by Adobe, which was only 17 years ago yes. But PDF is just a bunch of additions to PostScript ( or .ps files) which has been a widely used format since 1982, which was 28 years ago.
As long as one avoids the worst of the PDF specific features like DRM and scripting, the bulk of the content and markup will be readable.
This is one format that will probably remain around next to forever, just like ASCII.
This is completely not true. Have you actually ever tried to get the first sample for free? It doesn't work.
I concur. I make programs that generate documents based on some of these 'open' standards.
- LaTeX is really the only thing you can trust if you want an editable text document. However (sadly) outside of scientific literature it's hardly used.
- PDF and PostScript is great if you want a read only document, it works but I don't think it's really an open standard. It's more of a form of output, not really a form of carrying information.
- ODF is an open standard and works really well but sadly not all editors interpret all tags the same.
- OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser, you can generate documents programmatically according to the OOXML standard but a lot of the functionality (simple things like hyperlinks) will be misinterpreted by Microsoft Office and possibly corrupt the document (unreadable to all) if re-saved in Office.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Isn't the contents of .docx files tied to the (proprietary, closed, secret, patented) algorithms within MS Word?
For example, you may be able to retrieve the text (not sure) but getting your formatting to look exactly like it did in MS Word, will require MS Word.
If you want proof, find another word processing app that can display it 100% compatible with MS Word without calling any code from MS Word.
Now explain how in 25 years time when most people vaguely remember what MS Word 2010 looked like or did, you will somehow open your .docx documents and have them look as they do now. If I know Microsoft at all, I know that the OOXML "Standard" will change (read: "extend") a LOT in 25 years.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
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
Somehow, I don't think that 25 years from now, people will care if it looks exactly like it looked now, as long as the text and section headings, toc and index, tables and lists... are intact, recoverable, and comprehensible by an archivist, and from there perhaps into public hands.
The best way to store a document isn't PDF. While the spec is open, the documents may not be -- copy and paste disabled, passwords, etc. PDF is a format with easily used features designed to LIMIT access. That's a hella poor choice for an archive format.
Text files - perhaps unicode files, today - are the best option. Markup languages like HTML are excellent because they let the viewer set the presentation to a great extent; section subheading sizes, font sizes, etc. Until we can edit defects out of the genome and repair all injuries, we also should be considering accessability. PDF, again, bad choice. Everything is determined by the document. HTML or something like it is oodles better: You set the font size, feed it almost directly to a reader, etc.
And as for formats like .doc and so on... no. Just, no.
But as bad as format issues are...
Storage media is worse.
You want to read your 1970's STWPC FLEX text files? I can do it for you. Not only do I have a working system with usable drives at 35, 40 and 80 track, single and double density, I also have a working emulation so once i have your data, I can put it up in software that was meant to understand it.
That's your most serious problem. Not the data format -- the data storage medium. better make it easy to transfer from a to b to c to n... because otherwise, it'll be like FLEX files... right now, I'm one of very few people in the world that can still read the original floppies. And I'm getting old, and am definitely not all that healthy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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?