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Ask Slashdot: Can Quickoffice On Chromebooks Topple Microsoft's Office?
Nerval's Lobster writes "As we discussed yesterday, Google is bringing a Quickoffice viewer to its new high-end Chromebook Pixel, with full editing ability expected within three months. According to TechCrunch, Quickoffice-on-Chromebooks comes courtesy of Native Client. If Chromebooks prove a hit (and Google ports Quickoffice onto devices other than the ultra-high-priced Chromebook Pixel), could that mean the beginning of the end of Microsoft Office's market dominance of the productivity software space? While Microsoft has been pushing into the cloud with software like Office 365, that's also Google's home territory. But can Google actually disrupt the game?"
an enterprise-class laptop? Is that what you're sayin??
Uhmmm... no.
Sent from my ENIAC
Insert some stupid headline "law" here.
And then insert some stupid comment about how LibreOffice is awesome (which it is, but in that case, why can't it disrupt MS Office?).
Insert a comment about how Google is evil (which they are), and how anything that runs in the browser can't be as good as something something mumble something.
And also, a quick jab about how MS sucks.
MS Office is too featured and too expensive for most users. Most home and small business users will be just fine with quickoffice or one of the free ones.
MS screwed up by not having a cheap version. they used to have Works but never pushed it to the point of people knowing about it. only idiots spent $200 for MS Office at home
Can Quickoffice topple MS Office?
No.
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
For various reasons, larger businesses - the major buyer of MS Office license - will not be adopting Quickoffice any time soon if at all.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
LibreOffice is much better than QuickOffice - and it seems to have had minimal impact on the juggernaut that is MS Office.
It's a bit like Google and other search engines. In theory one could come along and topple Google. In reality, the reason that Google (and MS Office) are in the position they are in is that "good enough" isn't enough to disrupt the market leader.
Think about what it would take to get you to shift from Google to Bing. Bing wouldn't need to be as good as Google, it would need to be obviously *better*.
QuickOffice doesn't have to be better than LibreOffice to disrupt MS Office - it's got to be quite obviously better.
Most of what I've seen Excel get used for in an office setting would be better served by a database....
But the point you make is fair enough, and the point I was going to make: people aren't going to invest in a new platform without a major impetus to go looking for a new platform. If the one they have works for what they're doing, then it's generally less hassle to keep buying it. This is why some banks are still running DOS....
Until Microsoft stops selling corporate licenses and forces everybody to Office Online where they can charge a monthly tithe, business simply isn't going to look elsewhere. It's coming... They're already trying to force home users to an online version... but I doubt Microsoft is stupid enough to think that business will happily accept switching to a platform where they don't have control over the files themselves, and home users will continue to buy the monthly tithe version of MS Office, because that's what they have at work. Very savvy, really....
Best laptop on the market is exceedingly subjective. Sub 5 hour battery price is unacceptable to a lot of people. Inability to run Windows is unacceptable to some others.
Over the years, I've kept tabs on, and used to one degree or another, various Office alternatives. Apple's Pages. OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. Etc. None of them are 100% compatible with Microsoft's file formats. For the type of work I do (law-and-motion briefs, appellate briefs, etc.), there are strict formatting requirements (e.g., line numbers 1-28 down the left side of the page, double-line borders, specific font and margin requirements, page limits, etc). There's also quite often a need to exchange documents with opposing counsel, for, e.g., joint stipulations. Finally, I need to be able to submit documents to the judge's chambers in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect .WPD) format, and they have to look right when the judge opens them. The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!)...
None of the 'Office alternatives' has been able to work with a document created by 'real' Office and retain its formatting; likewise, none of the documents I've created using Pages or OOo or ... has looked anything close to what it should (all line numbering/borders gone, etc) when opened in 'real' Office.
For even moderately complex documents, the alternatives, including Google Docs (a/k/a/ Drive), QuickOffice, etc., do not create or properly work with fully Word compatible documents, and hence I cannot use them in my profession. Office 2011 is a cost of doing business for me.
geek. lawyer.
The reason the new Chromebook Pixel has been panned by reviewers is simple:
On a normal laptop: You can run chrome and every other application.
On the Pixel: You can only run chrome.
So why would I pay the same price for a device which limits what I can run? Windows 8 tablets have tradeoffs from their ARM/Windows RT compatriots. They have worse battery life, they weigh more and they cost more. The Pixel is like paying $1200 for a windows tablet that only ran IE.
Most of what I've seen Excel get used for in an office setting would be better served by a database....
That's true. But the average user isn't technically savvy enough to configure a database (and even if they could, IT policy might prohibit it), while that same user can come up with something quick-and-dirty in Excel. The ease of use makes up for the limited feature set and sub-par performance.
In theory, these Excel "apps" should be replaced with real databases by IT once they become an important part of business logic, but in practice, that seldom happens, and the original hacked-together solution continues to be used for many years.
QuickOffice doesn't have to be better than LibreOffice to disrupt MS Office - it's got to be quite obviously better.
Actually Libreoffice is better than Microsoft Office in many ways, Google has Branding [and Money, influence and power], something Libreoffice unfortunately lost [Much to the disgrace of the Apache foundation]. Lets be honest Microsfoft Office in not very good, if it hadn't been for an incredibly entrenched monopoly [or open file formats] it would have been replaced years ago.
I'll argue that it is not. Here are a few ways in which someone might consider another option better:
-It's heavier than some
-It cannot detach screen and/or flip in such a way to get keyboard out of the way
-The keyboard doesn't have a nipple mouse
-It can't run Windows
-It doesn't have as much ram as others
-It doesn't have as fast a processor as others
-It doesn't have as much battery life as others.
-It doesn't support pen input
The truth is, there is no such thing as 'the' greatest laptop on the market today. Everyone has different preferences and priorities.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.
Steve Balmer said the the iPhone would fail because enterprise wanted a phone with a keyboard [its quite famous]. I don't know if its true about enterprise adopting quickoffice, but the days of enterprise influencing your purchasing habits have long gone.
PLEASE.
If you've seen sites like TechCrunch or Business Insider they are fond of writing articles with salacious titles like the one above. The article titles are deliberately inflammatory and custom-designed to create click-through traffic as well as troll-ridden "comments" where people heatedly argue about the merit or lack of merit (almost always the latter) of the article's poorly-researched content. For those reasons I've deliberately chosen not to follow those sites any more.
The OP assumes so much it's ridiculous. Office is the Sun; QuickOffice is a microscopic dot on the Sun. Of the Fortune 1000 how many, realistically, use Chromebooks? Or Google Apps, even? It's creeping up there surely, but so few it's not even a statistical aberration yet.
Long-term there is no question more and more office functions will move to the web and they will be used by more and more companies - probably mostly the small, sub-1000-5000 employee companies. The apps are getting very good but there will always be a large percentage of corporations who did not want any apps or data sitting outside the company LAN/WAN, period. In 10-15 years we may laugh about how silly we were to use apps installed on our computers but for the foreseeable future it's MS Office for the VAST majority of large-ish companies and the business community out there.
only idiots spent $200 for MS Office at home
Yeah especially when it only costs $140.
I would have to pay For the crippled home and business 2013 its £220($333) and for office professional its £390 ($590)
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-office-professional-2013-FX102918381.aspx?WT.intid1=ODC_ENGB_FX010064710_XT103927664&WT.intid2=ODC_ENGB_FX010064710_XT103927685
The only thing that can hope to topple MS Office is an open document format. Microsoft has a format in ISO but it's not quite accurate enough to do an independant implementation and has many vague descriiptions of behaviors and/or descriptions of behaviors that references things not part of the office suite. (I'm sure most of us followed the whole ISO certification thing... they "fast tracked" a standard which wasn't complete or accurate and has yet to be fully implemented.) So OOXML is still quite proprietary and no one can faithfully implement it based on the ISO speciification alone.
They did eventually describe the stranger parts of the specification (e.g. 'autoSpaceLikeWord95'). The problem is that OOXML is basically an XML-serialized dump of MS Office guts; it wasn't designed from the ground up with interoperability in mind like ODF was, so interoperability is very hard. The spec runs to literally thousands of pages.
The new version of Office is supposed to include the option to save as "OOXML Strict", which should cut back on some of the deprecated junk (such as VML) in the OOXML spec. But I don't think this will be enabled by default, and even if it was, the old documents will continue to be around for years to come and will still have to be dealt with.
Google is one of the few organizations on the planet (other than Microsoft) with the resources to produce a good OOXML document reader/writer, so it's a shame that their efforts here have been so lackluster.
> Think about what it would take to get you to shift from Google to Bing.
A gun to my head and my family held hostage.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The real question is though as always does Microsoft Office matter, as someone who has lived without it using then the answer is yes, and I think the lower priced chromebooks running ARM will will enterprise.
So you agree that Office matters, BUT you think Chrombooks will win out anyway? Is that what you said?
I'm not so sure.
If people are going to embrace cloud storage, Google is going to have to offer Zero Knowledge Encrypted storage, because big business, or sensitive business (medical, legal, etc) is not going to be able to use any hardware solution where they place their documents in another companies hands who in turn could hand them over to anyone with a National Security Letter.
You need a local storage capability or a secure storage where the cloud operator can't decrypt your files. (aka like SpiderOak).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
No, because its nothing to do with preferences(sic) and priorities(sic).
You' ve indicated by the use of "(sic)" that those two words are either misspelled or improperly-used.
Would you care to elaborate, as both words are spelled properly...?
Many moons ago, I started working for a company that was [cough] lax in their licensing of productivity software. They griped about how much it would cost to get their licenses in order. I got the relevant VeeP to install OpenOffice and try it for a month. He asked me for help on a couple of minor issues during that time and, at the end of the month, he said he'd been able to do everything he needed to do without ever opening the old software once. He was able to open, edit, and save every document and exchange documents within the company and with our clients and vendors with no trouble at all. "Great! So I can develop a plan to transition us to OpenOffice." "No. I just don't feel comfortable using something that doesn't cost money."
By the time I left the company, our licenses were in order and we had a new VeeP who embraced open source, free, etc. software but it was an uphill battle that shouldn't have been a battle at all.
I don't know. I keep seeing LibreOffice showing up in more and more households. I started using it because it is just more convenient to download it and use it than it is deal with buying MS Office. Yes, the price difference matters, but the convenience of not having to deal with a transaction and any kind of DRM is the real reason. MS Office is just more hassle than it is worth.
That being said, I don't do a lot of writing. For 90% of my word processing, (like this) a text box in the browser is more than enough. I am not writing huge novels. I am not doing enterprise level accounting. But, I do believe that I am in the majority in my needs. I tend to use 4 word processors:
Notepad: When I specifically want to strip special characters and formatting.
Wordpad: When I want a scratch pad that supports simple formatting
Google Docs: When I want to collaborate on a document
LibreOffice: When a want a complex (relatively speaking) document
I have simply never created a document that LibreOffice wasn't more than adequate for. Word processing reached maturity some time between 1997 and 2000. Word was the best word processor around that time, and thus reached maturity first. I can't pin the specific time that LibreOffice/OpenOffice reached maturity, but it was more than a version ago. We are now in an attrition phase. Word is still prettier than LibreOffice, but for the vast majority of users it is only prettiness and momentum that holds people to Word. Every time a kid just downloads LibreOffice because he doesn't know yet that he is suppose to be tied to MS, the MS juggernaut gets a little weaker.
Why are we discussing whether a office viewer program which does not even having editing capabilities right now and is sure not to get them for the next few months, will beat Office? Is this a joke or what?
QuickOffice is a proprietary closed source application running on one of the most locked down computers out there, the Chromebook with Secure Boot, where you can't even install Open/LibreOffice like you can do on any Windows PC and is heavily tied to the cloud and is crippled with low storage to encourage you to put valuable files on Google servers.
Why is Slashdot cheering this again?
This space for rent.
It only takes a generation for a monopoly like that to disappear. I see that with traditional telephones vs. Skype. My son (8) and his circle of friends (6-16) all have smart phones. You would think that they would call each other a lot. They don't. They use Skype almost exclusively. They will sit on their cell phones talking to each other via Skype on the phones. For these kids, the "phone" part of the smart phones is for calling your parents and ordering pizza. For talking to peers you use Skype. My first instinct was to wince at their choice, but I very quickly realized that the problem was mine and that I was falling prey to being used to the traditional phone systems network effect. For these kids, the network effect is pushing Skype over the traditional 10 digit phone system. When new kids join the group, they are quickly pushed to install Skype if they want to be involved in the groups activities.
Will these kids switch to the traditional phone system when they hit 18? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. I have a feeling that they will use the 10 digit phones for what they have to, but that those of us that predate Skype and it's ilk will be dragged into the much better future of post Bell communication.
If these kids started trading text documents, I don't think it would take long for LibreOffice to topple MS Office in their demographic.
Forget the clickbait question posed. As the one (!) commenter on the Slashdot Business Intelligence post asked,
Google Docs already runs in the browser that's the central focus of Chromebooks/ChromeOS. Offline Google Drive/Google Docs editing has been available on any computer running Chrome since version 20 last year and works well,
So why is Google screwing around with Native Client (which will never run in other browsers), developing a separate codebase and another UI? There's a part of Google that believes in the open web, and then there are all the groups doing Android and Native Client and Dart and whatever. Either upper management is too weak to corral all the divisions, or they're happy to develop proprietary ecosystems just in case one succeeds the way Android did.
=S