Google Launches New Assault On Microsoft Office

Hugh Pickens writes writes "BetaNews reports that Google has announced the global availability of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which went into beta late last year with technology that builds off Google's acquisition of DocVerse. Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is essentially a plugin for Windows versions of the productivity suite (2003, 2007, 2010). 'The plugin syncs your work through Google's cloud, so everyone can contribute to the same version of a file at the same time,' says Google Apps product manager Shan Sinha. Additionally, Google announced a 90-day trial for Appsperience, described as 'a way for companies that currently use cumbersome legacy systems to see how web-powered tools help their teams work together more effectively.'"

Comments

collaboration doesn't look as good as in gdocs

[mantis2009]

Google docs has real-time collaboration (you can see other people's edits as they happen). The video on collaboration for Google Cloud Connect in MS Office says you have to save before edits are synced to all collaborators. Sounds like a recipe for lots of sync inconsistencies to me.

Re:collaboration doesn't look as good as in gdocs

[oakgrove]

You can't have multiple people editing a word document anymore than you can have multiple people driving a car on their way to the office.

To make such a far reaching statement, I assume you've actually tried it, right?

Well, I have and i find it works surprisingly well. We have two women where I work; one works mostly on the internet side and the other mostly on the b&m side. They both have to collaborate on creating things like custom order forms and promotional literature, etc. to send out to new clients.

Before I got there, one would start something in Excel or Word and make it a little ways, then email it to the other who would do some more work then email it back. They would do this however many times it took until they were satisfied.

The first thing I did was get them off of Office, then I showed them how to use Google Docs and the collaborative editing features. I've never seen two happier women over a word processor in my life. Now, what used to take days takes less than an hour. It's amazing. The little green cursor pops up on one screen and the red one on another and away they go.

The simultaneous editing of documents, in my opinion, makes up for any lack of features that Google Docs may suffer from in comparison to Office. It's unbelievable how much more productive people are when they take the time actually try it out and get used to it.

Re:collaboration doesn't look as good as in gdocs

[Luckyo]

Erm, so in your opinion, every time more then one person have to work on the same file at the same time (aka collaboration), sitting at the one, same computer, it's a "clusterfuck"?

Do you even understand what collaboration features are designed for? They are there to recreate the experience of multiple people sitting at one monitor and keyboard, working on one document. This is common office work in most companies, from more complex presentations to folks in accounting going over same account sheets and everything in between.

This is supposed to be this way. It has always done that way before, when these people sat in the same room. Nowadays everyone is at their own workstation, collaborating in the cloud is essentially trying to recreate that same thing. You can do stuff like "hey, what do you think of this here?" "no, this here is wrong", etc while being on other sides of the planet without having to essentially email the same document back and forth a thousand time.

Re:collaboration doesn't look as good as in gdocs

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Does no-one these days realise how much productivity is lost by the ability for people to instantly and frequently interrupt you?

This is why I no longer use IM at work. (Note, my employer encourages IM for communication between employees.)
People don't even try to solve a problem, they just interrupt me.

Re:collaboration doesn't look as good as in gdocs

[FatdogHaiku]

My God Man! Think of the BIG PICTURE. People will know when I'm not doing something, and may even expect some sort of performance improvement after they figure out that I now do nothing at all.
Seriously, I am going to lose sleep over this...
And I'll probably be expected to try and recoup those lost z's at home.
Doh!
Stupid Cloud...

Re:collaboration doesn't look as good as in gdocs

[Sulphur]

This is not a good place to insert a car analogy. Try Libraries of Congress or something else.

Imagine a school bus full of kids learning to backseat drive.

How is this an assault?

[Suki I]

The title does not seem to go with the article. It sounds like Google is adding more functionality to Microsoft Office, free of charge. What am I missing?

Re:How is this an assault?

[atomicbutterfly]

The title does not seem to go with the article. It sounds like Google is adding more functionality to Microsoft Office, free of charge. What am I missing?

Slashdot is no different to most mainstream media these days - everything has to be classed using aggressive words like "war", "assault" or something else dramatic. The odds of using such emotion in a headline increases when dealing with articles about Microsoft. I don't expect things to change one bit, because it seems to work.

Re:How is this an assault?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

• Throw grit in the upgrade treadmill: If Google gets a portion of the MS-Office customers using the new service, and if MS-Office upgrades break the functionality the users will complain. In the past Microsoft will ask them to go fly a kite and ramp up the speed of the upgrade treadmill a notch. Now Google has enough credibility and if it blames/accuses Microsoft of deliberately messing up the API, Microsoft could not shrug it off or giggle at it like it did to DR-DOS
• Detailed usage profile: Google will have very detailed view of the docs being saved, features being used most often. It will help cherry pick the most important functionality to implement in Google Docs.
• Portability Testing: Google would have a steady supply of documents it can experiment with in testing how well it ports to Google doc and back. Yeah, yeah, there are some confidentiality issues. But google could easily replace the text with random gibberish but keep all the formatting in its test suites. Or it could get some companies to volunteer to be guinea pigs. Or pay to volunteer. Or just be a little evil and use it anyway
• Platform grab: Just grab the platform, interaction and the plumbing first. The actual application that is running on it can eventually fall into your lap. Same thing MS did in its fight with WordPerfect, Lotus123, dBaseIII etc. If google owns the platform, MS-Office is just another GUI app.

Re:How is this an assault?

[dave562]

They are taking aim at SharePoint. Now users can collaborate on documents without needing Microsoft's solution (SharePoint).

Re:How is this an assault?

[Monchanger]

It sounds like Google is adding more functionality to Microsoft Office, free of charge. What am I missing?

For a moment don't be Microsoft, be Google: Think three steps ahead.

Today Google is making Office do something Microsoft still hasn't implemented for companies too small (or too smart) to use Sharepoint.
Tomorrow the company's employees are editing documents from anywhere, changing their ideas of what the Internet can do (RIA) and that you don't actually need Office to read a .doc[x].
The next day the boss realizes Google has something to offer and it's much cheaper and often higher quality than the stuff he's been licensing from Microsoft.

It's not guaranteed to work, but there's nothing to lose. Worst-case scenario? Nobody buys the service, Google wasted a teeny tiny fraction of its $35B cash on-hand, shuts it down and Office is offline again. No biggie.

Plus, Google called Microsoft Office not just "cumbersome", but "legacy". Them's fightin' words.

So this is basically, a distributed filesystem

[Colin Smith]

But without locking or versioning. That'll work a treat. Fastest finger wins.

Sorry, forgot, we get to spend our lives on conference calls now, we can all play distributed lock manager. Like dungeons and dragons but corporate.
 

Re:So this is basically, a distributed filesystem

[Simon80]

Let me get this straight. You're saying that Google Docs and this product are fundamentally flawed because they don't force the user to lock things before editing? The versioning is present, it's just implicit, which is the way it should be if the average user is going to willingly use version control.

Re:So this is basically, a distributed filesystem

[Colin Smith]

No. It was a comment meant to be funny. Get a sense of humour installed. I think Debian have one in their repo.

 

whuh?

[Thud457]

"Too the cloud, Alice!"
What the hell does that even mean?!!!

Re:Incorrect Title

[quangdog]

I'm still confused about the word "Assault" in this title... if they are assaulting with MS Office - whom are they assaulting? The only other decent real-time distributed document editing system that is worth using is google docs. Why would Google partner up with MS to assault... Google?

I'm still amazed at the stranglehold that MS Office maintains - I've not owned or used a copy of Office in more than 10 years. Plenty of alternatives exist, and they work great.

Re:Good Luck!

[mclearn]

Have you even used Google Docs before? Every document has a detailed versioning history with full support to revert back.

Re:How does this go with european data privacy?

[oakgrove]

You said "MS Office". Are you referring to the desktop silo'd version or the online version? I'll assume you mean the one you have to use on your desktop PC.

Four problems.

• It costs too much when the competition is free. Of course my problem solving didn't fail. I successfully moved us to Google Docs.
• Office doesn't have real time collaborative editing. Google Docs does. We save real money when people can work together faster. If I tried to pitch Office to my boss after he's seen how much more gets done with Google Docs, he'd throw me out on my head.
• When we create documents, we like them automatically shared and accessible from any other computer anywhere. Google Docs does this automatically and instantly. Office does not.
• Google Docs works on the boss's iPad. MS Office does not.

Re:web-powered?

[Mia'cova]

While I find the term "web-powered" quite painful, we do call plenty of things "web services." In this case, I would assume that's how this is implemented. These days, services are beginning to unify their APIs. Rich clients and ajax-based browser app are starting to share the same web service APIs. So if it's implemented as a web service, I wouldn't take offense to the term "web-powered," even though it reeks of marketing.

Re:BINGO!

[dave562]

SharePoint is good for a lot of things, but I would put Google Docs like collaboration pretty far down the list. It's great for large projects. I've seen construction companies and law firms leverage it very successfully. But for 10 people, Google Docs is probably all you need.

The thing I like about SharePoint is the way it supports processes and work flows. For example, if you have something like a construction bidding process where you're often filling out the same forms over and over again, and a lot of people are involved at different phases of the process, you can setup a work flow to route the documents from person to person. SharePoint handles the noticing "Hey Bob, it's time for you to sign off on X, Y and Z! Click here."

Microsoft: Been There, Done That

[DavidD_CA]

All registered users of Microsoft Office 2010 enjoy the free Sky Drive service, a 2 GB storage space in "the cloud".

Not only can you share files with others, but it integrates directly with the "Save" command in Office as one of the destinations.

Oh, and the people you invite to collaborate with you don't even have to have Office. They can log in (for free) and edit your documents via the web-based versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It's rather slick, and yes, it works in Firefox and Safari.

The worse of both worlds

[Pascal Sartoretti]

So you get the worse of both worlds : locked-in with a proprietary Microsoft file format, and your data handed over to Google. Great.

Sorry, but I'd much prefer a standards-based solution (ODF documents on a WebDAV server, maybe).

They're not assaulting anything with Docs sucking

[jollyreaper]

They've spent the last year making Docs suck more and more.

1. Disabled offline editing, no replacement in sight but they promise it'll be fixed.

2. Locked you into fixed page width and are unable to change how things are laid out.

3. The new editor removed tons of customization because it was a big rewrite. I can understand getting basic features working before working on advanced ones but you can't roll out a new version of your product with less features than the original, critical features people are relying on.

This is a problem with software as a service. If you fucking HATE the ribbon you can stick with Office 2003. There's the issue of not being able to work as easily with people using the new version of Office but at least your internal documents are fine. Using Docs, you have to upgrade when everyone else does and if they screw up something you like, there's no sticking with the old version.

Re:BINGO!

[marcosdumay]

Share Point is great for a lot of things. Unfortunately, being a trustworthy repository for data and making good use of servers are not some of those things. Your example also:

"For example, if you have something like a construction bidding process where you're often filling out the same forms over and over again, and a lot of people are involved at different phases of the process, you can setup a work flow to route the documents from person to person."

This is a great example of Microsoft taking a problem and creating a huge piece of software that makes the problem bigger. If you are often filling out the same forms over and over again, there is your problem. Now, you must either stop filling the forms (if they are not data aquisition), or at least stop making they flow around like they were useable data (if they are data aquisition).