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Microsoft Adds Chrome Support For Office Web Apps
CWmike writes "Microsoft will release the first service pack for Office 2010 in late June, when it will for the first time support Google's Chrome running the suite's online applications using SharePoint 2010, the company said on Monday. Google and Microsoft have repeatedly knocked heads over each others' online applications. In May 2010, Matthew Glotzbach, Google's enterprise product management director, kicked off the public battle by urging companies to forget about upgrading to Office 2010 and calling on them to instead add Google Docs to their mix. 'Google Docs makes Office 2003 and 2007 better,' Glotzbach said at the time. Microsoft quickly countered by saying that Google Docs' integration with Office was inferior to Office Web Applications' and that its rival's claims were 'simply not true.'"
Do I need a gay pirate outfit and a Marlon Brando snarl to use it?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
... and next week, Microsoft becomes open-source.
Microsoft is right here (for now). As to why anyone needs office applications ...
Had to be said.
I am waiting to see how M$ is going to pull this one off.
It is probably because Chrome Support was easy. As IE 9 supports HTML 5 and they are getting away from Active X and actually making their Web Apps Web Compatible. I think Microsoft realized they may have won the browser war but failed in their objectives (having a monopoly on setting the standards). I think IE 9 is an attempt to save face in the area where developers are no longer developing for IE First then trying to get it to work for other browsers if it is easy, They are actually going the other way around.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Google Presentation is woefully inadequate and has trouble importing and exporting PowerPoint documents.
Google Spreadsheets is slow and lacks good copy and paste support.
Google Document is okay, but lacks basic things like a side ruler and good insert table by paste support.
SCHESTOWITZ, Newham, Tuesday (NTN) — Office 365, Microsoft's pay-as-you-go answer to Google Docs, delivers the same delight you're used to from Office on your PC, only slower and clunkier and only working on Internet Explorer. Remember Internet Explorer? Of course you do!
>Microsoft Online Services have marketed Office 365 directly to your bosses, who have little people like you to do all the bits that involve actually touching a computer. It promises a fully integrated solution to your daily working needs, with the reliability of Hotmail and Sidekick. That is, it promises it to your IT department, who can now inflict ribbon toolbars on your system without you even having to reboot.
The application monitors your daily activity for increased efficiency, automatically timesheeting your use of Facebook or Twitter at work, for your comfort and convenience when demonstrating their business necessity and utility to your company's social media strategy to your boss. Firefox no longer works, but that's a small price to pay for this sort of well-maintained elegance.
The final Office 365 release will include a marketplace where Microsoft partners will be able to sell applications for your Windows Phone or BlackBerry. (Android and iPhone are not supported, and will in fact explode on contact.)
The ribbon toolbar will not be present in the next version of Office 365, whose interface will be based on the recently-released hit game Portal 2. "Windows 7 was my idea," says user interaction consultant GlaDOS.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The fact that Google Presentations lack the Find and Replace function is a non-starter for me. Their lackluster speed simply makes things worse.
I prefer to store my documents in a secure location.
My home.
Therefore I will continue using MS Office 97 and/or LibreOffice.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
I think Microsoft realized they may have won the browser war but
Are you on drugs?
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
I would settle for Outlook Web Access support for any browser other than IE.
... has looked good on paper forever. Put your documents on the cloud!
Yep, just upload customer-list.txt and we'll take good care of it! Heh, heh, heh!
First CentOS and now this. Yep....the rapture (http://judgementday2011.com/) is coming!
No, he is completely correct. They DID win the browser wars. Then, after some time, they got complacent and new browsers came up to challenge them. This new ware isn't over as MS still has over 50%, but just because they aren't "winning" right now doesn't mean they didn't already win. The US and allies won World War 1. That didn't mean wars were all over (although it was supposed to be the "war to end all wars"). We still had to fight another World War. MS did indeed win the last browser war. Just like originally the Romans won their wars (before they lost a later one).
It is probably because Chrome Support was easy. As IE 9 supports HTML 5 and they are getting away from ActiveX and actually making their Web AppsWeb Compatible.
This. I've used the Office Web Apps before and I couldn't find anything that didn't work in Chrome. Safari was officially supported from the start, and both it and Chrome use WebKit. Support for Chrome is being "added" in only the most technical sense. It's the license that has changed, not the software.
Breakfast served all day!
The thing is that they had to have done both (winning the initial browser war and having a monopoly on the standards for the time; for most people, they still have both). It's hard to keep having a monopoly on standards years down the road, though it would have been very interesting if they tried.
But blah blah Vista, blah blah ambition, blah blah.
See that horse you're whipping? It's dead. Let it go.
What people are not realizing is that Google Docs and the upcoming Android tables and Chrome laptop computer is the first real threat to the MS domination. In the past MS has maintained dominance on the theory that any PC had to be licensed with MS software because it was assumed that any naked PC was bought for the intention of pirating MS Windows. This meant that even if one wanted to run *nix, one still had to have the MS license, so where was the cost savings? Even if one built one's own machine, if one has a single MS Windows machine running, one was open to being attacked by the BSA and MS for piracy, even if everything was licensed. An disgruntled employee could easily set something up for the reward money.
With thins MS is defending itself against the upcoming machines that run the office application over the network and cannot run Windows. This is the $20/month machines that are allegedly soon to be offered by Google. Yes, these machines are going to be a disappoint to some. Yes they will not be as great as advertised. I think they will end up costing more. But they will be machines that will potentially never generate any income for MS. And they will be mass market. This is new a potentially scary territory for people would depend on MS, not to mention MS.
It is true that Google docs are to suck. But so were MS office products. It was years before MS had anything as good even as MacWrite, which was free on the Mac. It was years before MS Excel for MS Windows was nearly as good as MS Excel for Macintosh. This was so apparent that MS really did at one point degrade the user experience on Mac, and stopped developing on any number of products to keep people on Windows. But even without such intervention, $1000 for a PC versus $3000 for a Mac kept most people on the MS Windows side, even though the products on MS Windows were vastly inferior
I can use Google Docs for production work. It is not great, but it is not horrible. There are things it cannot do, but per $20 per seat including computer I can work around the issues. Some of the problems, like the spread sheet, are real. Other problems, like the word processor, are due to people thinking that everything should run like word. The presentation software is no worse than MS Powerpoint, and I can't believe that so many think Powerpoint is still legitimate software. Again, it has to do low expectations.
I think that people who license MS software wil continue to do so for some time. I would wonder about the profitability of new company that choose to spend that king of money on legacy products. It would be like basing your business on IBM Selectric in the mid 80's.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Chrome only has 10% of the market current but that is rapidly going up. I wonder if Microsoft feels more threatened by Mozilla currently? This is akin to IE for HP/UX only and not Linux, Irix, Solaris, or MacOSX (at first) because they had the biggest marketshare. Chrome is rising fast and from the research I did these past few days when I got a new computer when I picked a browser showed a lot of discontent with many Firefox users become Chrome users. I may end up switching. Either way I can not imagine anyone wanting to pay money for it. You might as well get Office as it is only $179 for home users and students.
For those bashing Google Docs you have to remember it is for creating simple documents for sharing and not for offices already invested in Microsoft technology. I would imagine Office 365 would drive me crazy even with full docx support. I used Google Docs in school and to share a few spreadsheets for expenses with family members. For work it is still all 100% office.
http://saveie6.com/
1) there is enough shit on the ribbon interface as it is without a google bar, yahoo bar, ask bar, porn bar ... ok maybe not the porn bar
2) google is kind of on my shit list as their recent "improvement" makes me now dance around logins and outs just because I dare have a personal account and a work account with them
meh
This one made me chuckle, if only because of Microsoft's having talked about how much HUMAN TESTING they do on their user interfaces!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Shoot I remember back in 2005 ... wow that long ago ... when it had over 85% of the market. Firefox had 10%.
In slashdot, I remember writting things like use open standards when using CSS folks! I would get flamed back saying that is a pain in the ass as we work hard to make the page work in IE and then these Firefox zealots use a browser that breaks by using esoteric open standards no one cares about.
One comment even said I sucked because I doubled his work as he prefered to only make sure the site worked on IE. 2005 is very recent and not that long ago. Odd that broken IE html was standard and the web masters blamed our browser rather than their code as broken.
So yes, IE did win the browser battle and it makes me happy they lost round 2 with Firefox and now Chrome mixed with Safari and mobile media devices.
http://saveie6.com/
Great! So when can I expect outlook web access to look decent in anything but IE? Doesn't really matter much, because my IT department just recently switched to 2007...
"its good enough." "its not great... but its not horrible." same rhetoric we've heard for years about why open office should beat out office. has not happened. why should office on the web be any different? if you have used office web apps + office client integration you would know that there is nothing on the market close right now. the combination of viewing documents quickly in the cloud but popping it open in a snappy client is the best productivity combination available. sorry google, msft has one upped you here. you got some work to do.
-mr silver
The story is not about people switching from MS Office to Google Docs. The story is about how or why people will ever need to upgrade to MS Office 201X. The bishop has checked that space.
Gently reply
I love Google Desktop Search, but it doesn't work in Outlook 2010, and Microsoft Search 4.0 is slow and doesn't seem to find all messages. Hopefully, GDS will work in Outlook 2010 also.
For some users, running Microsoft Office is a litmus test for a computer system, no matter what features may or may not be missing. Fewer features is actually better for most. So this is big for Chrome OS. Whether that makes Chrome OS on Atom worth $450, I don't know.
I would still say most users are better off on an iPad with Apple's $10 Keynote, $10 Pages, and $10 Numbers. My experience has been that users need less training (although they do need a little to get some of the gestures) and make much better output and enjoy their work much more, plus they have mobility. Working on a document or slide deck when inspiration strikes is very valuable, so mobility is a huge feature. A downside with Apple's office tools is online sync is not quite there, but Apple is clearing bringing that, and most users are mystified by Google Docs anyway. For presentations, there is nothing even close to Keynote.