You've posted twice here to object to the fact that I try to have the courtesy to individually respond to everyone who is talking to me, rather than vomiting my opinion then leaving.
Of course I'll repeat myself somewhat, but that's not for your benefit - that's for the benefit of people who made the effort to reply and who have taught me some things I don't know or have given me ideas I haven't thought of.
I mean heck, why not install solid gold toilets, since the people sitting on them and the building they're in would surely cost more, what difference does it make?
Let p=1 be the base productivity with MS Office, and q<p be the productivity with Google Docs. Then the employee cost for the first unit of work for MS Office will be, for some constant k
k + m and, since Office cost m is a fixed cost, for n units will be
nk + m. The employee cost for the first unit of work with Google Docs will be
k/q and for n units will be
nk/q.
We have
nk + m < nk/q when
m < nk(1/q-1). IOW, you'd have to be doing a tiny small amount of work _and_ experience only a very negligible tiny productivity increase, to prefer Google Docs over MS Office.
In your strawman toilet example, q=1, so of course there's no value in installing gold toilets.
That's all anyone with a decent system in the first place does, and he wastes time doing so.
The backend was already a combined choice of local and centralised server storage. I added a few new features to manage moving documents between the two, but there's no reason to use an HTML interface to do this.
If everything's a web app, there's no real reason to use different desktop operating systems. So how about you skip the OS merging in the slide down to lowest common denominator and just install Windows? Then you'll be able to use Office 2007 and have decent collaboration and functionality.
Maybe the Google Docs target market is people who need to do basic collaboration and for some reason require Windows, Linux and Mac desktop environments, yet find VMware, VirtualBox and Virtual PC too difficult to install. Seems like a fairly niche market, but that's no reason not to cater for it, I guess.
web applications cannot give your computer viruses (as long as your browser does not have security issues)
Which it will. Especially as it becomes more complex. Especially viruses which upload your various cloud passwords. So you'll need antivirus anyway. Which, combined with some user awareness (gee I guess the browser is secure so I can click "Yes" when it asks if I want to install that extension by M1rcosoft....), already stops the average desktop getting infected.
Anyway, if you move the logic to the server, your concern should be shifted to viruses on the server as much as the desktop. And determined intruders. 'cos there'd be no value in plain cracking Google, right, competing firm? China?
Then again, with iPhone, apps are replacing websites to some extent... maybe we will be heading back towards thicker clients.
We've never headed away from them, except in very clear limited circumstances and in the minds of certain groups of geeks. But, yes, the iPhone/iPad seems to be a far more rational balance between cloud storage/processing and local functionality than Google Apps.
Huh? When they login, they get app configuration updates - the same way you send OS configuration updates.
Workstations that need to be off of the domain for whatever reason (QA test labs,
Why do you need to be "on the [main] domain" to push a script? If you're trying to set up a PC to be exactly like a client setup, why are you running main workflow software?
security PC doing badge creation, etc).
Why are you running main workflow software on this machine?
I used Firefox's default MSI and rolled my own package using SMS2003. It took all of fifteen minutes.
Please, where is Firefox's default MSI? It's taken me 5 of your 15 minutes to fail at finding it, so I may be lacking competence tonight.
I'd rather patch one central application than manage patches across thousands of desktops.
You have to patch the OS and browser anyway, so you're already having to manage patches across thousands of desktops. What goes particularly wrong with Office patches?
Opinions don't change the reality that the landscape is shifting back to thin clients and powerful servers.
Opinions of a million Slashdot usernames don't change the reality that most desktops are Windows on Intel, most US voters are Republican or Democrat, most Brits are pro-capital-punishment, most white men are more likely to cross the street when the young man approaching them is black, etc., but nothing about a majority or a trend makes it necessarily sensible or rational. Don't introduce such glaring fallacies.
Nobody in their right mind wants to manage thousands of separate installations when presented with the option to manage ONE.
If (1) you actually didn't have to manage those thousands of OS/browser installations anyway; and (2) productivity was measured by what meant IT had to do slightly less work rather than how efficiently everyone else in the firm could work, you might be approaching a point:-).
A couple years ago we had to setup temporary / part time employees with their own Outlook profile. Now we just give them the URL and that's it.
Could you explain in what way setting up a profile and sending a login (or a link to a script which sets up the login) is more arduous than setting up a profile and sending a URL plus login details?
Young and beautiful in 1999, I was involved in writing a browser-based CRM frontend for an old time&billing suite which has been deployed to major accounting firms since the '70s.
Know what?
*Shrug*
No advantage.
It sold because it was new-buzzword-compliant, but, despite being my best effort at usability in the browser, it could offer nothing which couldn't be done more efficiently using the old native Windows interface. 10 years later and Javascript would, I guess, allow me to prettify (N.B.) the interface more and get rid of the ActiveX control which provided complex charting... but I'd still be offering no advantage.
Every client work PC would have the full suite installed already. Anyone else could just pop in the CD and press Next 5 times. What was the point?
More primitive UI Reduced stability Reduced configurability Lack of scripting More primitive collaboration (ironically, vs Office 2007) Loss of dozens of features Security awareness and implementation (now the humble employee must be aware of various implications relating to where his data might be going!) Network downtime Server downtime Retraining
at least until virtualization and SANs are so ubiquitous at the LAN / private WAN level that organizations can host the "online" version of Office in house.
Can vs should.
By the time Microsoft rolls out a worth while online version of Office, whatever version of IE that comes bundled with the OS will support it.
Right, and a lot better than all those competing online suites, so for anything even remotely close to usable online app delivery, you'll still have to choose a browser which doesn't have an interest in a particular app delivery business.
Firefox does have decent MSI installers and also.ADM files so that you can use GPOs to configure it. I'm not a big fan of Firefox, but I'll correct FUD anywhere I see it.
Could you provide a link, please? I know there are various unofficial installers and configuration templates, such as the ones from FrontMotion, but if we're talking about ease of deployment, this obviously doesn't compare!
In an online model you don't even have to run scripts on the clients. You configure the app in one place and the relevent settings are loaded when the clients connect to the app.
Clearly, but what's so difficult in a managed enterprise about getting every PC to run a simple configuration script? If the answer is "well, many of the PCs are fucked and have very unreliable setups", you're not going to get a uniform experience over your heterogeneous browser client environment either - and probably need to replace your IT department.
"God, I'm so fucking tired of dealing with licenses
MS activation is a bitch, but this isn't an inherent problem with desktop software.
network issues,
Wait, network issues are a reason to use web-hosted software?!
making sure that everyone is using the same copy of a document,
Does your knowledge of Office end with an old copy of Office 2000 you ran on Windows 98 a decade ago? Collaboration in 2007 is provided in various guises, with the principle that you don't want to sacrifice features and usability, so you make use of the operating system's own filesharing features combined with central storage (not UI/logic) servers for advanced collaboration.
trying to get access when I don't have a laptop configured for the company VPN
The VPN exists for security in access of documents. Any enterprise could be as lackadaisical as Google Docs and not worry about VPNs, but enterprises care more about their data than Google. Regardless, does your knowledge of setting up VPN clients on Windows end with Windows 98? It's been a matter of a couple of clicks and, assuming no other authentication mechanism, entering a username/password for a good decade now.
"What the hell, even Google Docs has THIS stupid problem figured out. Why can't these guys?"
What problem does it have figured out? Please explain it to me in simple terms. Don't tell me what it does - tell me what problem I had that I wouldn't have with Google Docs.
I could research, but having been in IT for over a decade at this point, I will continue to "bet" until applications are actually in production.
MS actually has Office 2010 beta available for download, while it only promises a feature limited online version of Office. Yet you "bet" on the opposite outcome, namely that MS will move to a web Office.
If you want to get technical, it IS harder to install Office than a browser. The browser (IE) comes pre-installed
So technical... IE is not a usable browser for anything Web2.0, and Firefox (the best alternative) had awful enterprise management last I checked... but maybe they're delivering MSIs etc now.
At the enterprise level, configuring Office beyond facilities provided by copious centralised management tools can be done the same way you configure any Windows app: a couple of clicks to push a script to all client machines. At the individual user level, you're either going to the Prefs menu via the Windows UI or via a horrible browser UI.
On every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with? Yeah, actually, that is a bit of a challenge.
And what's so much easier about installing a suitable browser on every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with?
most everyone also has higher-value tasks they could be performing instead if "installing an app" was taken care of.
Stop it. Clicking "Next" 5 times and waiting a few minutes - once - is incomparable to the productivity lost by operating an online Office suite for several hours a day. It's also quicker for me to set up a desk with a pad of paper, a ballpoint pen and a calculator than to set up and plug in a PC - but you know what's more efficient over time?
Do you understand how much money [Microsoft] Office is to license?
Almost nothing, relative to the cost of the employee sitting at the workstation. Productivity is far more important than base licence cost.
Do you have any idea how many exploits are in the Office suite alone?
Almost none, relevant to a well configured Office install. And none recent are as bad as the one big risk that is having your plaintext on an anonymous server accessible to various foreign corporations and governments.
Well, at least Google's never been penetrated and experienced information leakages, and they're responsible with full disclosure of vulnerabilities, right?
I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is.
You could just substitute research for "betting" and observe what MS is actually doing with their next release: building a limited online version of Office, but selling the usual feature-complete local tools which take advantage of the speed, reliability, connectivity and UI of a native app.
It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office.
Why not spend the time installing Office, rather than a browser, so they can actually get work done? Seriously, a reason to use Google Docs over Office is that it's harder to install Office than a web browser?
I find Office much easier to deploy than Firefox, because Microsoft actually thinks about enterprise deployment in their installer. I find Office easier to use than Google Docs, because it provides a familiar native UI.
Sorry, but times change, needs change, the desktop was and always has been awful.
Yeah, life was much better when we all paid by the minute on the local mainframe. What a retrograde step it was for IBM/MS to come along with their PC! To put the power to work and play in the hands of individuals, rather than far away corporations... quite unacceptable.
Distribution through discs and shareware meetups was painful and i'm glad it is on the way out.
Yes, because that's what people who don't use HTML+JS apps must do now. Seriously, what?
Eventually the internet is going to be solid and reliable for (mostly) everyone.
Firstly, no it won't be - pretty much nothing throughout human history has become, let alone remained, globally solid and reliable. Secondly, so what? Why would I hire someone half way across the globe to crack a nut when I can use my own nutcracker from the kitchen drawer?
Security is certainly an issue, but with encryption on client-end before any transmission, already not a problem.
And which algorithms and their implementations do you trust? Go on, put all your most valued possessions in the safest transparent safe money can buy, in the middle of a random building one thousand miles away. Tell everyone where it is. Watch what happens.
But until "The Cloud" operators allow such a thing, it will remain a problem for those who deal with a lot of sensitive data.
Yes, why don't "Cloud" operators provide such a thing? Could it be because it's hard to offer collaboration solutions where only clients can see decrypted data? Could it be because they're smarter than you, and see the value of lots of readable data?
Personally, i'm thrilled with the new changes coming. I can't wait till it becomes the norm.
Tomorrow belongs to you, comrade! Should I stand or rest my palm on my forehead?
Also, someone needs to stand up and tell people to stop developing these browser based applications.
Don't be obtuse. I defend your right to express yourself through writing browser-based applications, but I have the right to criticise your expression.
If you want to edit a document, you should install a native application on every PC you want to access it on.
Yes, businesses have so much trouble installing Office on every PC. So few kids have grown up intimately familiar with computers and no-one knows how to click "Next" five times any more. You're solving a problem which does not exist, whether you like to admit it or not.
You should have to sort out all the details of network storage and collaboration yourself.
What? The underlying collaboration layer can interface with whichever storage medium on a local, enterprise or public server, and all you need to do is name your cluster (sorry, "cloud") and provide login details.
If you don't have the time or expertise to set that up, you don't deserve to be editing documents.
Everyone has the time to install an app. Google want to pretend that no-one does. That's the way service-based economies go: convince everyone that they don't have the time/ability to do what they've always been able to do quite easily.
If you accept the convenience offered by such online companies, don't be surprised when many horrible things happen to you!
There is nothing convenient about Google Docs. If I want to do anything simple, Office is good enough and has better availability, speed, familiarity (including native UI integration) and stability. If I want to do anything complex, only Office will provide it.
Video playback, offline storage, threads and... input validation? The '90s called, it wants its basic desktop back.
Seriously, who cares? Yay, we can deliver an app via the buggy, bloated, insecure browser+cloud instead of on the desktop using native, always-available logic and the full gamut of UI wizardry provided by the OS.
If you want to collaborate, build and standardise on network storage and collaboration APIs (more...). Let people otherwise run their own software tailored for their preferred environment, rather than the lowest common denominator. You know where we all saw this before? Around 1997, when people thought Java on the desktop would take off and replace native apps. (And at least Google had the cunning to see that Java is a usable language, developing solutions therein and translating to HTML/Javascript.)
Berners-Lee, you had a great thing with the WWW of information. You even tried hard to develop metadata for content, rather than markup/presentation, so the web wouldn't be the horrible but occasionally pretty mess that it is. But W3C has been taken over by organisations who each see a way of monetising the web by laying the standards track in their direction.
What was cool when I dived into it 15 years ago on my ageing monochrome Mac with NCSA Mosaic is now boring. It's a battle between team A - the tech superstars from Apple to Google - whose ultimate aim is to take control from you, and team B - the old media from Murdoch to RIAA - whose ultimate aim is to take control from you. And, as geeks grow up, their one idealistic dreams about a free medium are replaced with increasingly fanatical cheerleading about increasingly uninteresting progress.
I'd rather not have the speed of a site measured by machines with users who choose to opt in to Google toolbar data gathering. That sample is not random, and certainly doesn't represent the geek market. Either way, it is "speed as seen by Google", whether it's via toolbars on millions of machines or one central server. As for the 1% figure, so what? Any new method is going to be applied conservatively by any sane organisation (and Google's fairly sane), but the more weight it has, the more SEO trolls will use it to reduce the quality of search results.
Here's the best measure of speed: lack of bloat. Does the site provide information using basic HTML, rather than a thousand stylesheets and.js includes, layers of Web 2.0 crap, huge images, Google ads and other banners, tracking, etc.? Google won't favour that because that sort of Web goes against Google's interests.
But a better idea might be to allow the user to interact with
Anonymous users, and teams of users operating under declared banners (acting independently of Google, but using an interface provided by Google). Such teams compete to provide the best filters, where there will inevitably be different segments of the population having different opinions on what's shit and what's not. Add possibility to filter results by one or more teams, with metalists.
For example: - Anti-Wikipedia-clone teams, which identify all clones of Wikipedia; - Anti-paywall teams; - Anti-comparison/review teams, which get rid of all the fucking "READ TWO LINE REVIEW OF PRODUCT XYZ" sites; - Anti-porn teams, which slavishly discover/visit porn sites which nevertheless appear when supposed filtering is enabled... etc.
The web's size hasn't come near to correlating with availability of good information.
Of course, making Google any better than just-a-little-bit-better-than any other search engine reduces time spent using Google, so reducing ad revenue, so it's never really in Google's interest to improve more than it has to. It's learnt that from Microsoft's approach to the Internet, I guess.
Really, am I the only one to find Google a fairly poor *find* engine? I mean, for anything which might remotely come close to sounding like it's a product, you've got Wikipedia right at the top, followed by 1000 review/comparison/pricing sites. For a tech question, you have expert-sexchange and 1000 crappy forums with responses from the downright wrong to the gratuitously abusive. I barely use Google (or any search engine much) for their generic WWW search - I'm more likely to be +site: searching a specific newsgroup/support forum/journal/enthusiast site I already know has intelligence. I don't need Google using yet another algorithm to fail at finding useful information - just employ 100 people spending 8 hours a day tagging the clone/spam/pricecheck/etc sites if you actually want to make a difference.
"Good" to current governments when applied to a particular view (and the laws which stem from that view) is a function with the following variables, in order of importance from most to least: 1. Ability to reduce power of the people relative to the government; 2. Value of income from lobbyists; 3. Number of votes from people; 4. Adherence to locally established ideological principles.
1 and 4 are often confused by dabblers.
Remember, boys: we're sufficiently democratic that we got to choose the representatives with these priorities. We Australians, British, Americans, French alike need to stop blaming "them" and start blaming ourselves. Our people want these governments. "I didn't vote for them!" perhaps, but your brother, your mother, your neighbour, your boss and your co-worker did, by and large. Why do you tolerate the people in power, but have nothing to say to or about those who put them in power? Are you worried to speak up at a personal level, where it matters and where you can make a difference?
To an extent. When you hold elections like it's a 4 year representative democracy but expect MPs to respond like Big Brother contestants, you get neither democracy nor entertainment. But which do you/want/?
If your hope is that, say, Lab will win the seat _but_ that Lab will take notice that you voted PP and act in Parliament accordingly (instead of according to his manifesto), then you're voting tactically. For you actually want Lab to represent you, yet you're voting PP.
Slashdot Mirror
Consume less. Buy second hand, upgrade only when you need to, don't buy iToys, enjoy the fresh air, etc.
The American govt doesn't have to do anything. You, OTOH, can.
You've posted twice here to object to the fact that I try to have the courtesy to individually respond to everyone who is talking to me, rather than vomiting my opinion then leaving.
Of course I'll repeat myself somewhat, but that's not for your benefit - that's for the benefit of people who made the effort to reply and who have taught me some things I don't know or have given me ideas I haven't thought of.
If it's too arduous to read this thread, don't!
I mean heck, why not install solid gold toilets, since the people sitting on them and the building they're in would surely cost more, what difference does it make?
Let p=1 be the base productivity with MS Office, and q<p be the productivity with Google Docs. Then the employee cost for the first unit of work for MS Office will be, for some constant k
k + m
and, since Office cost m is a fixed cost, for n units will be
nk + m.
The employee cost for the first unit of work with Google Docs will be
k/q
and for n units will be
nk/q.
We have
nk + m < nk/q
when
m < nk(1/q-1).
IOW, you'd have to be doing a tiny small amount of work _and_ experience only a very negligible tiny productivity increase, to prefer Google Docs over MS Office.
In your strawman toilet example, q=1, so of course there's no value in installing gold toilets.
That's all anyone with a decent system in the first place does, and he wastes time doing so.
The backend was already a combined choice of local and centralised server storage. I added a few new features to manage moving documents between the two, but there's no reason to use an HTML interface to do this.
If everything's a web app, there's no real reason to use different desktop operating systems. So how about you skip the OS merging in the slide down to lowest common denominator and just install Windows? Then you'll be able to use Office 2007 and have decent collaboration and functionality.
Maybe the Google Docs target market is people who need to do basic collaboration and for some reason require Windows, Linux and Mac desktop environments, yet find VMware, VirtualBox and Virtual PC too difficult to install. Seems like a fairly niche market, but that's no reason not to cater for it, I guess.
web applications cannot give your computer viruses (as long as your browser does not have security issues)
Which it will. Especially as it becomes more complex. Especially viruses which upload your various cloud passwords. So you'll need antivirus anyway. Which, combined with some user awareness (gee I guess the browser is secure so I can click "Yes" when it asks if I want to install that extension by M1rcosoft....), already stops the average desktop getting infected.
Anyway, if you move the logic to the server, your concern should be shifted to viruses on the server as much as the desktop. And determined intruders. 'cos there'd be no value in plain cracking Google, right, competing firm? China?
Then again, with iPhone, apps are replacing websites to some extent... maybe we will be heading back towards thicker clients.
We've never headed away from them, except in very clear limited circumstances and in the minds of certain groups of geeks. But, yes, the iPhone/iPad seems to be a far more rational balance between cloud storage/processing and local functionality than Google Apps.
Laptops on the road are the primary example.
Huh? When they login, they get app configuration updates - the same way you send OS configuration updates.
Workstations that need to be off of the domain for whatever reason (QA test labs,
Why do you need to be "on the [main] domain" to push a script? If you're trying to set up a PC to be exactly like a client setup, why are you running main workflow software?
security PC doing badge creation, etc).
Why are you running main workflow software on this machine?
I used Firefox's default MSI and rolled my own package using SMS2003. It took all of fifteen minutes.
Please, where is Firefox's default MSI? It's taken me 5 of your 15 minutes to fail at finding it, so I may be lacking competence tonight.
I'd rather patch one central application than manage patches across thousands of desktops.
You have to patch the OS and browser anyway, so you're already having to manage patches across thousands of desktops. What goes particularly wrong with Office patches?
Opinions don't change the reality that the landscape is shifting back to thin clients and powerful servers.
Opinions of a million Slashdot usernames don't change the reality that most desktops are Windows on Intel, most US voters are Republican or Democrat, most Brits are pro-capital-punishment, most white men are more likely to cross the street when the young man approaching them is black, etc., but nothing about a majority or a trend makes it necessarily sensible or rational. Don't introduce such glaring fallacies.
Nobody in their right mind wants to manage thousands of separate installations when presented with the option to manage ONE.
If (1) you actually didn't have to manage those thousands of OS/browser installations anyway; and (2) productivity was measured by what meant IT had to do slightly less work rather than how efficiently everyone else in the firm could work, you might be approaching a point :-).
A couple years ago we had to setup temporary / part time employees with their own Outlook profile. Now we just give them the URL and that's it.
Could you explain in what way setting up a profile and sending a login (or a link to a script which sets up the login) is more arduous than setting up a profile and sending a URL plus login details?
Young and beautiful in 1999, I was involved in writing a browser-based CRM frontend for an old time&billing suite which has been deployed to major accounting firms since the '70s.
Know what?
*Shrug*
No advantage.
It sold because it was new-buzzword-compliant, but, despite being my best effort at usability in the browser, it could offer nothing which couldn't be done more efficiently using the old native Windows interface. 10 years later and Javascript would, I guess, allow me to prettify (N.B.) the interface more and get rid of the ActiveX control which provided complex charting... but I'd still be offering no advantage.
Every client work PC would have the full suite installed already. Anyone else could just pop in the CD and press Next 5 times. What was the point?
Seriously?!
More primitive UI
Reduced stability
Reduced configurability
Lack of scripting
More primitive collaboration (ironically, vs Office 2007)
Loss of dozens of features
Security awareness and implementation (now the humble employee must be aware of various implications relating to where his data might be going!)
Network downtime
Server downtime
Retraining
at least until virtualization and SANs are so ubiquitous at the LAN / private WAN level that organizations can host the "online" version of Office in house.
Can vs should.
By the time Microsoft rolls out a worth while online version of Office, whatever version of IE that comes bundled with the OS will support it.
Right, and a lot better than all those competing online suites, so for anything even remotely close to usable online app delivery, you'll still have to choose a browser which doesn't have an interest in a particular app delivery business.
Firefox does have decent MSI installers and also .ADM files so that you can use GPOs to configure it. I'm not a big fan of Firefox, but I'll correct FUD anywhere I see it.
Could you provide a link, please? I know there are various unofficial installers and configuration templates, such as the ones from FrontMotion, but if we're talking about ease of deployment, this obviously doesn't compare!
In an online model you don't even have to run scripts on the clients. You configure the app in one place and the relevent settings are loaded when the clients connect to the app.
Clearly, but what's so difficult in a managed enterprise about getting every PC to run a simple configuration script? If the answer is "well, many of the PCs are fucked and have very unreliable setups", you're not going to get a uniform experience over your heterogeneous browser client environment either - and probably need to replace your IT department.
"God, I'm so fucking tired of dealing with licenses
MS activation is a bitch, but this isn't an inherent problem with desktop software.
network issues,
Wait, network issues are a reason to use web-hosted software?!
making sure that everyone is using the same copy of a document,
Does your knowledge of Office end with an old copy of Office 2000 you ran on Windows 98 a decade ago? Collaboration in 2007 is provided in various guises, with the principle that you don't want to sacrifice features and usability, so you make use of the operating system's own filesharing features combined with central storage (not UI/logic) servers for advanced collaboration.
trying to get access when I don't have a laptop configured for the company VPN
The VPN exists for security in access of documents. Any enterprise could be as lackadaisical as Google Docs and not worry about VPNs, but enterprises care more about their data than Google. Regardless, does your knowledge of setting up VPN clients on Windows end with Windows 98? It's been a matter of a couple of clicks and, assuming no other authentication mechanism, entering a username/password for a good decade now.
"What the hell, even Google Docs has THIS stupid problem figured out. Why can't these guys?"
What problem does it have figured out? Please explain it to me in simple terms. Don't tell me what it does - tell me what problem I had that I wouldn't have with Google Docs.
You built a new PC, you installed Firefox, you entered username/password for the mailserver, you logged into GMail.
I built a new PC, I installed Outlook, I entered a username/password for the SSL IMAP mailserver.
Just kidding, I didn't even have to enter username/password as I could migrate my Windows account profile with a couple of clicks.
I could research, but having been in IT for over a decade at this point, I will continue to "bet" until applications are actually in production.
MS actually has Office 2010 beta available for download, while it only promises a feature limited online version of Office. Yet you "bet" on the opposite outcome, namely that MS will move to a web Office.
If you want to get technical, it IS harder to install Office than a browser. The browser (IE) comes pre-installed
So technical... IE is not a usable browser for anything Web2.0, and Firefox (the best alternative) had awful enterprise management last I checked... but maybe they're delivering MSIs etc now.
At the enterprise level, configuring Office beyond facilities provided by copious centralised management tools can be done the same way you configure any Windows app: a couple of clicks to push a script to all client machines. At the individual user level, you're either going to the Prefs menu via the Windows UI or via a horrible browser UI.
On every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with? Yeah, actually, that is a bit of a challenge.
And what's so much easier about installing a suitable browser on every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with?
most everyone also has higher-value tasks they could be performing instead if "installing an app" was taken care of.
Stop it. Clicking "Next" 5 times and waiting a few minutes - once - is incomparable to the productivity lost by operating an online Office suite for several hours a day. It's also quicker for me to set up a desk with a pad of paper, a ballpoint pen and a calculator than to set up and plug in a PC - but you know what's more efficient over time?
Do you understand how much money [Microsoft] Office is to license?
Almost nothing, relative to the cost of the employee sitting at the workstation. Productivity is far more important than base licence cost.
Do you have any idea how many exploits are in the Office suite alone?
Almost none, relevant to a well configured Office install. And none recent are as bad as the one big risk that is having your plaintext on an anonymous server accessible to various foreign corporations and governments.
Well, at least Google's never been penetrated and experienced information leakages, and they're responsible with full disclosure of vulnerabilities, right?
I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is.
You could just substitute research for "betting" and observe what MS is actually doing with their next release: building a limited online version of Office, but selling the usual feature-complete local tools which take advantage of the speed, reliability, connectivity and UI of a native app.
It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office.
Why not spend the time installing Office, rather than a browser, so they can actually get work done? Seriously, a reason to use Google Docs over Office is that it's harder to install Office than a web browser?
I find Office much easier to deploy than Firefox, because Microsoft actually thinks about enterprise deployment in their installer. I find Office easier to use than Google Docs, because it provides a familiar native UI.
Sorry, but times change, needs change, the desktop was and always has been awful.
Yeah, life was much better when we all paid by the minute on the local mainframe. What a retrograde step it was for IBM/MS to come along with their PC! To put the power to work and play in the hands of individuals, rather than far away corporations... quite unacceptable.
Distribution through discs and shareware meetups was painful and i'm glad it is on the way out.
Yes, because that's what people who don't use HTML+JS apps must do now. Seriously, what?
Eventually the internet is going to be solid and reliable for (mostly) everyone.
Firstly, no it won't be - pretty much nothing throughout human history has become, let alone remained, globally solid and reliable. Secondly, so what? Why would I hire someone half way across the globe to crack a nut when I can use my own nutcracker from the kitchen drawer?
Security is certainly an issue, but with encryption on client-end before any transmission, already not a problem.
And which algorithms and their implementations do you trust? Go on, put all your most valued possessions in the safest transparent safe money can buy, in the middle of a random building one thousand miles away. Tell everyone where it is. Watch what happens.
But until "The Cloud" operators allow such a thing, it will remain a problem for those who deal with a lot of sensitive data.
Yes, why don't "Cloud" operators provide such a thing? Could it be because it's hard to offer collaboration solutions where only clients can see decrypted data? Could it be because they're smarter than you, and see the value of lots of readable data?
Personally, i'm thrilled with the new changes coming. I can't wait till it becomes the norm.
Tomorrow belongs to you, comrade! Should I stand or rest my palm on my forehead?
Also, someone needs to stand up and tell people to stop developing these browser based applications.
Don't be obtuse. I defend your right to express yourself through writing browser-based applications, but I have the right to criticise your expression.
If you want to edit a document, you should install a native application on every PC you want to access it on.
Yes, businesses have so much trouble installing Office on every PC. So few kids have grown up intimately familiar with computers and no-one knows how to click "Next" five times any more. You're solving a problem which does not exist, whether you like to admit it or not.
You should have to sort out all the details of network storage and collaboration yourself.
What? The underlying collaboration layer can interface with whichever storage medium on a local, enterprise or public server, and all you need to do is name your cluster (sorry, "cloud") and provide login details.
If you don't have the time or expertise to set that up, you don't deserve to be editing documents.
Everyone has the time to install an app. Google want to pretend that no-one does. That's the way service-based economies go: convince everyone that they don't have the time/ability to do what they've always been able to do quite easily.
If you accept the convenience offered by such online companies, don't be surprised when many horrible things happen to you!
There is nothing convenient about Google Docs. If I want to do anything simple, Office is good enough and has better availability, speed, familiarity (including native UI integration) and stability. If I want to do anything complex, only Office will provide it.
Video playback, offline storage, threads and... input validation? The '90s called, it wants its basic desktop back.
Seriously, who cares? Yay, we can deliver an app via the buggy, bloated, insecure browser+cloud instead of on the desktop using native, always-available logic and the full gamut of UI wizardry provided by the OS.
If you want to collaborate, build and standardise on network storage and collaboration APIs (more...). Let people otherwise run their own software tailored for their preferred environment, rather than the lowest common denominator. You know where we all saw this before? Around 1997, when people thought Java on the desktop would take off and replace native apps. (And at least Google had the cunning to see that Java is a usable language, developing solutions therein and translating to HTML/Javascript.)
Berners-Lee, you had a great thing with the WWW of information. You even tried hard to develop metadata for content, rather than markup/presentation, so the web wouldn't be the horrible but occasionally pretty mess that it is. But W3C has been taken over by organisations who each see a way of monetising the web by laying the standards track in their direction.
What was cool when I dived into it 15 years ago on my ageing monochrome Mac with NCSA Mosaic is now boring. It's a battle between team A - the tech superstars from Apple to Google - whose ultimate aim is to take control from you, and team B - the old media from Murdoch to RIAA - whose ultimate aim is to take control from you. And, as geeks grow up, their one idealistic dreams about a free medium are replaced with increasingly fanatical cheerleading about increasingly uninteresting progress.
I'd rather not have the speed of a site measured by machines with users who choose to opt in to Google toolbar data gathering. That sample is not random, and certainly doesn't represent the geek market. Either way, it is "speed as seen by Google", whether it's via toolbars on millions of machines or one central server. As for the 1% figure, so what? Any new method is going to be applied conservatively by any sane organisation (and Google's fairly sane), but the more weight it has, the more SEO trolls will use it to reduce the quality of search results.
Here's the best measure of speed: lack of bloat. Does the site provide information using basic HTML, rather than a thousand stylesheets and .js includes, layers of Web 2.0 crap, huge images, Google ads and other banners, tracking, etc.? Google won't favour that because that sort of Web goes against Google's interests.
But a better idea might be to allow the user to interact with
Anonymous users, and teams of users operating under declared banners (acting independently of Google, but using an interface provided by Google). Such teams compete to provide the best filters, where there will inevitably be different segments of the population having different opinions on what's shit and what's not. Add possibility to filter results by one or more teams, with metalists.
For example:
- Anti-Wikipedia-clone teams, which identify all clones of Wikipedia;
- Anti-paywall teams;
- Anti-comparison/review teams, which get rid of all the fucking "READ TWO LINE REVIEW OF PRODUCT XYZ" sites;
- Anti-porn teams, which slavishly discover/visit porn sites which nevertheless appear when supposed filtering is enabled... etc.
The web's size hasn't come near to correlating with availability of good information.
Of course, making Google any better than just-a-little-bit-better-than any other search engine reduces time spent using Google, so reducing ad revenue, so it's never really in Google's interest to improve more than it has to. It's learnt that from Microsoft's approach to the Internet, I guess.
...close to and prioritising Google. Gotcha.
Really, am I the only one to find Google a fairly poor *find* engine? I mean, for anything which might remotely come close to sounding like it's a product, you've got Wikipedia right at the top, followed by 1000 review/comparison/pricing sites. For a tech question, you have expert-sexchange and 1000 crappy forums with responses from the downright wrong to the gratuitously abusive. I barely use Google (or any search engine much) for their generic WWW search - I'm more likely to be +site: searching a specific newsgroup/support forum/journal/enthusiast site I already know has intelligence. I don't need Google using yet another algorithm to fail at finding useful information - just employ 100 people spending 8 hours a day tagging the clone/spam/pricecheck/etc sites if you actually want to make a difference.
"Good" to current governments when applied to a particular view (and the laws which stem from that view) is a function with the following variables, in order of importance from most to least:
1. Ability to reduce power of the people relative to the government;
2. Value of income from lobbyists;
3. Number of votes from people;
4. Adherence to locally established ideological principles.
1 and 4 are often confused by dabblers.
Remember, boys: we're sufficiently democratic that we got to choose the representatives with these priorities. We Australians, British, Americans, French alike need to stop blaming "them" and start blaming ourselves. Our people want these governments. "I didn't vote for them!" perhaps, but your brother, your mother, your neighbour, your boss and your co-worker did, by and large. Why do you tolerate the people in power, but have nothing to say to or about those who put them in power? Are you worried to speak up at a personal level, where it matters and where you can make a difference?
To an extent. When you hold elections like it's a 4 year representative democracy but expect MPs to respond like Big Brother contestants, you get neither democracy nor entertainment. But which do you /want/?
If your hope is that, say, Lab will win the seat _but_ that Lab will take notice that you voted PP and act in Parliament accordingly (instead of according to his manifesto), then you're voting tactically. For you actually want Lab to represent you, yet you're voting PP.