...they could've demanded LaTeX instead. Actually TeX does have something going for it - there are multiple implementations from different vendors that fully implement the standard and will all produce identical output from a given file. That's more than you can say for any of the XML document formats currently around - even ODF produces different output in different implementations (try opening the same file OpenOffice.org, KWord, and Abiword)! Of course much of that is due to the fact that TeX has been around for so long without any significant changes and, given enough time, XML formats will likely settle toward the same level of quality from different implementations. Still, TeX's consistency is impressive.
I can write a text to text converter in about *0 lines* of perl. Well sure, but you're assuming an encoding standard for the text. If the output text has to be EBCDIC I doubt you'll manage it in zero lines. Given the way things are going, assuming XML as a markup for structured files is no worse than assuming ASCII as the encoding for text files. It doesn't have to be XML, but then a text file doesn't have to be ASCII.
In other news, Microsoft is quickly subsidizing 3 small companies to write quick and meaningless stupid plug-ins using OOXML as input, just to pretend that their format is "Implemented by multiple vendors" and on "diverse (...) platforms" (ie.: Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP *and* Windows Vista)... I think MS may actually have already squeezed through this particular hole. The reality is that other vendors are going to have to be able to read and write OOXML at a basic level for compatability. They'll never fully implement the standard that MS has written because they can't possibly implement the behaviour of the <SpaceLikeWord95> tag and all the others like it, but they'll have something. If you demand a "full" implementation from multiple vendors you're just digging yourself a different hole: nothing will qualify. Honestly, try reading and writing.odf files in a few different products (OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, Writely, etc.) and you'll find the formatting gets noticeably messed around. Fully implementing ODF might be more feasible than fully implementing OOXML, but that doesn't mean it will actually happen. It seems MS has managed an effective pre-emptive strike against such legislation - they've created a "standard" that is just open enough to qualify, but sufficiently obscured that no one else can actually claim full compatability - the kicker being that full compatability is unlikely with any sufficiently complicated standard (as standard for office documents are bound to be) so you can't specify that as a criterion.
I think the kicker for Microsoft will be the
(1) Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications; and
(3) Implemented by multiple vendors; clauses, though it will of course depend on exactly how those are interpreted. It is unlikely that anyone other than Microsoft will fully implement OOXML, so "multiple vendors" rules it out under a strict interpretation. If people want to get around it, however, you can go with a loose interpretation and point to all the vendors who will, out of necessity, provide a basic implementation of OOXML for the sake of compatability and importing documents. Likewise with the interoperable among platforms - with no MS Office for anything other than Windows and Mac, OOXML doesn't qualify as interoperable among diverse platforms. On the other hand you can go back to a loose interpretation and claim that OpenOffice.org "has an implementation of OOXML" (because they will have to have something for compatability's sake) and hence OOXML works on a diverse range of platforms (everything that OpenOffice.org runs on).
If you think minority governments can be a good thing (and indeed they can be), then support proportional representation for Canada. I'm a New Zealander now living in Canada, so I've seen how proportional representation effected politics in NZ (with both pros and cons) and realistically I believe it would be a significant step forward for Canada.
"a cold molson"? A real Canadian would use the term "beers".
Come now, I think calling Molson "beer" is being a bit generous. Sure, it has less resemblance to water than the mainstream US brands (Budweiser, Millers, etc.), but calling it "beer" is just taking things a bit too far.
I mean, really - is anything in Canada a true target? My understanding that the "cells" in Canada were in place for attacks on targets in the US.
The plan was to bomb major buildings in downtown Toronto, so yes there were significant targets, and yes they were Canadian targets. As to cells being in place to attack US targets - well that implies or assumes some sort of overall governing strategy which simply doesn't seem to be the case. The Canadian terrorist plot that was foiled was, much like the London bombings, a case of home grown terrorists who were simply "inspired by", but had absolutely no links to, Al Qaeda. The claim that there is some worldwide terrorist network that is out to get the US seems to be more a phantom created by certain US politicians than anything. The reality seems to be unconnected groups who, inspired by the publicity given to "global terrorism", decide that terrorism seems to be a way to take out their personal (and often local an homegrown) frustrations. There is no terrorist mastermind behind it all. And that's one of the reasons why local law enforcement is already sufficiently empowered to deal with such groups without any special provisions for "terrorists". We need to stop treating "terrorists" as anything significant and start treating them like the common criminals they are.
In my opinion, when Jesus said "Judge not others" He meant it.
So out of curiousity, when he was asked what one must do beyond knowing and following the 10 commandments in order to be admitted to heaven and he replied "One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor", do you think he didn't mean it, or are you just not that interested in eternal life?
I have a feeling this is a pointless exercise, but...
Do you have proof / have you seen any example what-so-ever of a mutation being beneficial to any species?
Antibiotic resistance in bacteria? Sickle cell resistance to malaria? Lactose tolerance? We haven't had too much time to analyse specific individual mutations and determine whether they confer any favourable qualities (where favourable ultimately relates to reproductive success), but they have definitely been found.
Also, what ever happened to all those hundreds of thousands of (not faked) fossilised transitional species which evolution was supposed to produce?And yet, you tell me you can't even find one (which hasn't been faked by radical darwinists)?!
This sounds like a losing bet to me - anything I can produce you will simply claim is "faked by radical darwinists" with little proof or justification. Still, in a later post you asked for a specific example:
So where's this half-fish, half-mammal, crocodile-like creature which you talk about? You know, the crocodile which has fins, and half-developed legs?
You mean like Tiktaalik? Which is a fish that had many adaptations to shallow water envrionments including "fins" that are halfway between fish fins and tetrapod limbs in structure and presumably function, lungs like a terapod (as well as gills like a fish) and tetrapod neck structure (for a mobile head like a crocodile and unlike a fish). We also have fossils of Panderichthys and Acanthostega which provide examples of creatures slightly more fish-like and slightly more tetrapod-like than Tiktaalik.
Great, now remake your argument without assuming that all "harmful" mutations effect procreation. What about them, huh?
Actually I think this was covered by his model. First, within his model "beneficial" means "positively effects reproductive success" and "harmful" means "negatively effects reproductive success", so obviously harmful mutations will effect procreation. You can argue about neutral mutations (of which there will be a lot), but they'll be in the same boat as the rest of the population, having, in his model, 1.95 children per generation on average. That means you may have some general drift in the population not benefitting from the original "beneficial" mutation, but the end result of a 2:1, beneficial:the-rest ratio in the population in 4000 years time will be the same. Ultimately all those neutral mutations provide more material for potentially beneficial compositions of mutations, but his point, which was only about whether an initial beneficial mutation could come to dominate, stands just fine.
Throwing up your hands and saying "its too complicated to explain to you" isn't going to help the situation. You give the best explanation you can under the constraints of understanding, and preface that with a disclaimer as to the simplified nature of the explanation. I think he did that just fine - it was a simplified model that held all other things equal, but it demonstrates the basic concepts with reagrd to the particular point he was making just fine.
The alternative is abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields, etc.), graph theory and category theory. I doubt you'd like that too much more. The reality is that CS degrees require mathematics, and lots of it. If you want a programming diploma head to a trade school.
One is that most teachers understand neither. They learned to do math the same way we are teaching it - by rote. This leaves them with no actual understanding of math, just a larger arsenal of mathematical tools to apply to problems. It's not really mathematics, it's computation.
I think this really is a pertinent point that is not being addressed. Most importantly it is particularly bad in elementary/primary school where teachers are quite likely to be math averse - and the students are getting their first exposure to mathematics. I think an interesting case study is Finland. In the late 90s Finland decided they needed to seriously improve their students math and science, and began a major program to do this. On of the major features of that program involved getting as many elementary/primary school teachers interested in math as possible. For teachers graduating teachers college at one school the number of elementary teachers who took university math courses went from around 10% to more like 80%! The result is that Finnish students are not among the very best in the world at mathematics.
I have to think about moving to NZ. Honest businesses.
NZ Telecom and "honest business" don't really go together. Telecom have done everything they can to try and lock out (including quite an impressive history of dirty tricks) any competition and have held back broadband in NZ years and years (it's even worse than US broadband - until recently 256K connections were considered high end). Things are opening up to compeition now though, so I think Telecom is facing the fact that once competition becomes widely available they're going to face a country-wide customer revolt unless they can do something to try and restore some semblance of reputation. This move is basically that - the realisation that they better refund people for having fucked them over for years lest they all move to the competition.
Ever since I started using word processors (which for me was a long time after I started using web browsers), i've always thought, why doesn't updating this style make all text with that style update? Why do I always have to change the same thing over and over again?
Such things exist. TeX provides a decent the base for such things, so it's a matter of finding a TeX centric editor. LyX would be a good example, and indeed it has the sort of functionality and general approach to document creation that you seem to be after. Of course it doesn't necessarily have all the other features that other word processors might have (like mail merge or what have you).
The solution to that is to use NX, which was designed with the realisation that, indeed, the standard X11 protocol is too chatty to work well over the internet. With compression, and caching etc. provided by NX you get a perfectly responsive X session.
If you have powerful client machines, performing UI operations over a network seems unnecessarily indirect and inefficient. The idea of using a network layer even for a local UI seems really extreme (I don't know enough about the X11 implementation to know how much of a performance hit it creates).
How much of a performance impact does it have? None in any modern X11 implementation. It all gets handled via shared memory for local operation and is every bit as fast as Windows or Quartz (any percieved slowness is more due to the fact that many X11 implementations lacked double buffering and other tricks to make things look "smooth" and flicker free - in terms of raw drawing performance X11 was and is right up there; note that this has been fixed with more recent versions, see AIXGL etc.) That means with X11 you get no performance hit for local apps and complete network transparence for everything else. If you're going to criticise X11 then complain about the network protocols chattiness that makes it slow over internet (As opposed to local LAN) connections.
An improvement, but you're still trying to push everything through HTTP, which is hardly a protocol designed for running GUI applications over a network. Ideally you'd use a special purpose network protocol designed with app display and transmission in mind (like, for example, X11 - it could be improved, but at least it was designed with network transparent applications in mind). Besides, it seems XUL isn't getting the traction that would be required to really take off as the web application standard - most web apps use AJAX or similar. Ultimately its about what you can expect the client/user to have. You can reasonably expect them to have a web browser, but expecting them to have a Mozilla based web browser which handles XUL is stretching a little.
Yup, the difference, however, is that many more people expect to install a browser than expect to install extra client software to make general Windows apps more network transparent - people don't install a browser just to run web apps. This is why web apps are becoming popular: because most users to have a browser anyway (go on, just try and get a Windows install that has no browser) it provides a client for network apps that developers can reasonably expect the majority of users to already have installed. It's just that browsers don't make for particularly good client apps for network application because, simply put, it wasn't the broswers intended purpose. I am simply lamenting the fact that, had things been a little different, we could have ended up with a much better client app installed by default on most users machines. An example of this is X11, which is installed by default on pretty much every desktop UNIX machine (because it has the primary purpose of displaying GUI apps, even local ones), which provides a reasonably good client for network apps - it could be better, especially over slower or higher latency connections, but it would provide a better base than web browsers.
Even if you don't need a specific feature yourself, are you sure some customer or partner won't use something beyond the capability of Google's import filters?
Again, it's goign to vary office to office. Again, while many offices may have the issue you describe, many will not, or at the least will have that problem sufficiently rarely that they can ask the client or partner to send the document in a different format (PDF, text, whatever) on the few occasions it arises. We're talking about small offices here, so there isn't necessarily much volume of complex formatted documents being exchanged.
Developers and users of network transparent applications. Developers could be working with ordinary applications instead of constrained to what can be done with XML and javascript - indeed they could be using the many toolkits and libraries already available instead of having to roll new ones to fit into the space of web applications. Users could be presented with applications no different than any other desktop application (it just happens to be running on a foreign server somewhere) with all the much richer interactivity and lower learning curve associated with that instead of whatever can be crammed down a protocol that wasn't originally designed for applications.
I'm not saying web apps are bad - they're quite good, and they do achieve the network transparency that's been missing for many Windows users. I'm just saying that, had things gone a little differently, things could have been so much better. We could be running apps over the internet via protocols specifically designed to handle GUI apps. We could be running apps over the internet that don't need to be specially coded to work around the limitations of the available languages and protocols used to send them - just write a desktop app and have it automatically work over the network. I'm hoping that there's still time to change track and move toward real network transparency instead of kluging it on top of HTTP.
With regard to network transparency, yes they do. They "just work" over the network, running on a server, with no set up and no hassle (just as X11 apps automatically do). That's an attractive feature for anyone intertested in thin client apps.
However, I wouldn't dream of (or rather I would dream of it, but then daytime reality kicks in) suggesting Google Apps as a replacement for MS Office. Not at this point.
That really depends on your needs. I know of some small offices that have relatively light office application needs and would be just fine replacing MS Office with Google Apps. For any major company it is clearly a no go because Google Apps just doesn't have all the required functionality. Indeed most of MS Office's market won't be able to make the switch. MS Office has a very big market though, and a lot of users simply don't need all the functionality it offers. Those that can get by with Google Apps instead may be a very small percentage of the MS Office market, but they may still be reasonably large numbers in absolute terms.
Looks like client-server was a fad. The terminal is back, only now the mainframe is at another company and the terminal is called browser.
Which seems a terrible shame really - surely there are better ways of running an application over a network than via a browser. After years of using the network transparency of X11 I find this whole move to browser based applications disappointing. Sure, the X protocol doesn't work well over slower connections (it's too chatty), but really wouldn't it be better to just fix those issues (such as with FreeNX) or write a better system so that we can actually have full normal GUIs instead of whatever can be kluged into a browser? Given the prevalence of web based applications I guess the answer is no. My best guess as to why is that, simply, Windows lack of network transparent display and market dominance trained people to have low expectations. Browser based stuff looks good in comparison to what's generally available for Windows so people assume it is a step forward instead of the step sideways that it appears to be to me.
Because I'm not retarded enough to add 40 different repos with incompatible builds of the same packages. You pick a set of repos that are intended to work with each other, or you go straight to the owner of the software being package and build your own (or in the event of proprietary software you ask them to provide a build for your distribution).
That still leaves room for a potentially legitimate complaint - that the available repositories are poorly organised or too small and don't provide the software required. If you have to go outside the base distro repositories for stuff then your odds of running into an incompatible repository or confusion due to a bad mix of self compiled and repository software increases. The less that's available via standardised repositiories the greater the risk. And this is a problem that people do seem to have with Fedora in comparison to Ubuntu: the basic Fedora repositiories are (or were, I gather they are expanding them) relatively small and many people felt the need to add extra repositories, leading to increasing risks of problems and incompatabilities. Ultimately even the Ubuntu solution (of having a truly massive repository) is only partial since no repository can have everything. This is why people complain about installing software on Linux: for the most part it isn't a problem because repositories cover most things. The weaker the repository though, the more problematic things appear.
Is that really a fair comparison, though? Google's email is great, but their Spreadsheet and Word Processor solutions are nowhere near as sophisticated as MS Office. And in an office environment, many of those differences do matter.
Yes this stuff is obviously not going to be as good as a full MS Office install. That doesn't really matter though, because this clearly isn't intended to be an Office "killer" or whatever you want to call it. Google is going after the low hanging fruit - people who have relatively simple needs and would prefer a cheap option, particularly one that has the benefits of offsite backup and accessibility from everywhere. That's not everyone, indeed it is a small market segment, so its hardly going to put a dent in MS Office's market share. On the other hand it is, aparently, a big enough market segment that Google thinks they cna make money at it - and I would tend to agree with them. MS Office is overkill for a lot of small companies, and those same companies tend to be the ones that are less inclined to have full time IT staff to manage file servers, backups, and so on. Just because the product isn't perfect for everyone doesn't mean there isn't a market big enough to exploit. Not everything has to be about total market domination.
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...they could've demanded LaTeX instead. Actually TeX does have something going for it - there are multiple implementations from different vendors that fully implement the standard and will all produce identical output from a given file. That's more than you can say for any of the XML document formats currently around - even ODF produces different output in different implementations (try opening the same file OpenOffice.org, KWord, and Abiword)! Of course much of that is due to the fact that TeX has been around for so long without any significant changes and, given enough time, XML formats will likely settle toward the same level of quality from different implementations. Still, TeX's consistency is impressive.If you think minority governments can be a good thing (and indeed they can be), then support proportional representation for Canada. I'm a New Zealander now living in Canada, so I've seen how proportional representation effected politics in NZ (with both pros and cons) and realistically I believe it would be a significant step forward for Canada.
Come now, I think calling Molson "beer" is being a bit generous. Sure, it has less resemblance to water than the mainstream US brands (Budweiser, Millers, etc.), but calling it "beer" is just taking things a bit too far.
The plan was to bomb major buildings in downtown Toronto, so yes there were significant targets, and yes they were Canadian targets. As to cells being in place to attack US targets - well that implies or assumes some sort of overall governing strategy which simply doesn't seem to be the case. The Canadian terrorist plot that was foiled was, much like the London bombings, a case of home grown terrorists who were simply "inspired by", but had absolutely no links to, Al Qaeda. The claim that there is some worldwide terrorist network that is out to get the US seems to be more a phantom created by certain US politicians than anything. The reality seems to be unconnected groups who, inspired by the publicity given to "global terrorism", decide that terrorism seems to be a way to take out their personal (and often local an homegrown) frustrations. There is no terrorist mastermind behind it all. And that's one of the reasons why local law enforcement is already sufficiently empowered to deal with such groups without any special provisions for "terrorists". We need to stop treating "terrorists" as anything significant and start treating them like the common criminals they are.
So out of curiousity, when he was asked what one must do beyond knowing and following the 10 commandments in order to be admitted to heaven and he replied "One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor", do you think he didn't mean it, or are you just not that interested in eternal life?
Antibiotic resistance in bacteria? Sickle cell resistance to malaria? Lactose tolerance? We haven't had too much time to analyse specific individual mutations and determine whether they confer any favourable qualities (where favourable ultimately relates to reproductive success), but they have definitely been found.
This sounds like a losing bet to me - anything I can produce you will simply claim is "faked by radical darwinists" with little proof or justification. Still, in a later post you asked for a specific example:
You mean like Tiktaalik? Which is a fish that had many adaptations to shallow water envrionments including "fins" that are halfway between fish fins and tetrapod limbs in structure and presumably function, lungs like a terapod (as well as gills like a fish) and tetrapod neck structure (for a mobile head like a crocodile and unlike a fish). We also have fossils of Panderichthys and Acanthostega which provide examples of creatures slightly more fish-like and slightly more tetrapod-like than Tiktaalik.
Actually I think this was covered by his model. First, within his model "beneficial" means "positively effects reproductive success" and "harmful" means "negatively effects reproductive success", so obviously harmful mutations will effect procreation. You can argue about neutral mutations (of which there will be a lot), but they'll be in the same boat as the rest of the population, having, in his model, 1.95 children per generation on average. That means you may have some general drift in the population not benefitting from the original "beneficial" mutation, but the end result of a 2:1, beneficial:the-rest ratio in the population in 4000 years time will be the same. Ultimately all those neutral mutations provide more material for potentially beneficial compositions of mutations, but his point, which was only about whether an initial beneficial mutation could come to dominate, stands just fine.
Throwing up your hands and saying "its too complicated to explain to you" isn't going to help the situation. You give the best explanation you can under the constraints of understanding, and preface that with a disclaimer as to the simplified nature of the explanation. I think he did that just fine - it was a simplified model that held all other things equal, but it demonstrates the basic concepts with reagrd to the particular point he was making just fine.
The alternative is abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields, etc.), graph theory and category theory. I doubt you'd like that too much more. The reality is that CS degrees require mathematics, and lots of it. If you want a programming diploma head to a trade school.
I think this really is a pertinent point that is not being addressed. Most importantly it is particularly bad in elementary/primary school where teachers are quite likely to be math averse - and the students are getting their first exposure to mathematics. I think an interesting case study is Finland. In the late 90s Finland decided they needed to seriously improve their students math and science, and began a major program to do this. On of the major features of that program involved getting as many elementary/primary school teachers interested in math as possible. For teachers graduating teachers college at one school the number of elementary teachers who took university math courses went from around 10% to more like 80%! The result is that Finnish students are not among the very best in the world at mathematics.
NZ Telecom and "honest business" don't really go together. Telecom have done everything they can to try and lock out (including quite an impressive history of dirty tricks) any competition and have held back broadband in NZ years and years (it's even worse than US broadband - until recently 256K connections were considered high end). Things are opening up to compeition now though, so I think Telecom is facing the fact that once competition becomes widely available they're going to face a country-wide customer revolt unless they can do something to try and restore some semblance of reputation. This move is basically that - the realisation that they better refund people for having fucked them over for years lest they all move to the competition.
Such things exist. TeX provides a decent the base for such things, so it's a matter of finding a TeX centric editor. LyX would be a good example, and indeed it has the sort of functionality and general approach to document creation that you seem to be after. Of course it doesn't necessarily have all the other features that other word processors might have (like mail merge or what have you).
The solution to that is to use NX, which was designed with the realisation that, indeed, the standard X11 protocol is too chatty to work well over the internet. With compression, and caching etc. provided by NX you get a perfectly responsive X session.
How much of a performance impact does it have? None in any modern X11 implementation. It all gets handled via shared memory for local operation and is every bit as fast as Windows or Quartz (any percieved slowness is more due to the fact that many X11 implementations lacked double buffering and other tricks to make things look "smooth" and flicker free - in terms of raw drawing performance X11 was and is right up there; note that this has been fixed with more recent versions, see AIXGL etc.) That means with X11 you get no performance hit for local apps and complete network transparence for everything else. If you're going to criticise X11 then complain about the network protocols chattiness that makes it slow over internet (As opposed to local LAN) connections.
An improvement, but you're still trying to push everything through HTTP, which is hardly a protocol designed for running GUI applications over a network. Ideally you'd use a special purpose network protocol designed with app display and transmission in mind (like, for example, X11 - it could be improved, but at least it was designed with network transparent applications in mind). Besides, it seems XUL isn't getting the traction that would be required to really take off as the web application standard - most web apps use AJAX or similar. Ultimately its about what you can expect the client/user to have. You can reasonably expect them to have a web browser, but expecting them to have a Mozilla based web browser which handles XUL is stretching a little.
Yup, the difference, however, is that many more people expect to install a browser than expect to install extra client software to make general Windows apps more network transparent - people don't install a browser just to run web apps. This is why web apps are becoming popular: because most users to have a browser anyway (go on, just try and get a Windows install that has no browser) it provides a client for network apps that developers can reasonably expect the majority of users to already have installed. It's just that browsers don't make for particularly good client apps for network application because, simply put, it wasn't the broswers intended purpose. I am simply lamenting the fact that, had things been a little different, we could have ended up with a much better client app installed by default on most users machines. An example of this is X11, which is installed by default on pretty much every desktop UNIX machine (because it has the primary purpose of displaying GUI apps, even local ones), which provides a reasonably good client for network apps - it could be better, especially over slower or higher latency connections, but it would provide a better base than web browsers.
Again, it's goign to vary office to office. Again, while many offices may have the issue you describe, many will not, or at the least will have that problem sufficiently rarely that they can ask the client or partner to send the document in a different format (PDF, text, whatever) on the few occasions it arises. We're talking about small offices here, so there isn't necessarily much volume of complex formatted documents being exchanged.
Developers and users of network transparent applications. Developers could be working with ordinary applications instead of constrained to what can be done with XML and javascript - indeed they could be using the many toolkits and libraries already available instead of having to roll new ones to fit into the space of web applications. Users could be presented with applications no different than any other desktop application (it just happens to be running on a foreign server somewhere) with all the much richer interactivity and lower learning curve associated with that instead of whatever can be crammed down a protocol that wasn't originally designed for applications.
I'm not saying web apps are bad - they're quite good, and they do achieve the network transparency that's been missing for many Windows users. I'm just saying that, had things gone a little differently, things could have been so much better. We could be running apps over the internet via protocols specifically designed to handle GUI apps. We could be running apps over the internet that don't need to be specially coded to work around the limitations of the available languages and protocols used to send them - just write a desktop app and have it automatically work over the network. I'm hoping that there's still time to change track and move toward real network transparency instead of kluging it on top of HTTP.
With regard to network transparency, yes they do. They "just work" over the network, running on a server, with no set up and no hassle (just as X11 apps automatically do). That's an attractive feature for anyone intertested in thin client apps.
That really depends on your needs. I know of some small offices that have relatively light office application needs and would be just fine replacing MS Office with Google Apps. For any major company it is clearly a no go because Google Apps just doesn't have all the required functionality. Indeed most of MS Office's market won't be able to make the switch. MS Office has a very big market though, and a lot of users simply don't need all the functionality it offers. Those that can get by with Google Apps instead may be a very small percentage of the MS Office market, but they may still be reasonably large numbers in absolute terms.
Which seems a terrible shame really - surely there are better ways of running an application over a network than via a browser. After years of using the network transparency of X11 I find this whole move to browser based applications disappointing. Sure, the X protocol doesn't work well over slower connections (it's too chatty), but really wouldn't it be better to just fix those issues (such as with FreeNX) or write a better system so that we can actually have full normal GUIs instead of whatever can be kluged into a browser? Given the prevalence of web based applications I guess the answer is no. My best guess as to why is that, simply, Windows lack of network transparent display and market dominance trained people to have low expectations. Browser based stuff looks good in comparison to what's generally available for Windows so people assume it is a step forward instead of the step sideways that it appears to be to me.
That still leaves room for a potentially legitimate complaint - that the available repositories are poorly organised or too small and don't provide the software required. If you have to go outside the base distro repositories for stuff then your odds of running into an incompatible repository or confusion due to a bad mix of self compiled and repository software increases. The less that's available via standardised repositiories the greater the risk. And this is a problem that people do seem to have with Fedora in comparison to Ubuntu: the basic Fedora repositiories are (or were, I gather they are expanding them) relatively small and many people felt the need to add extra repositories, leading to increasing risks of problems and incompatabilities. Ultimately even the Ubuntu solution (of having a truly massive repository) is only partial since no repository can have everything. This is why people complain about installing software on Linux: for the most part it isn't a problem because repositories cover most things. The weaker the repository though, the more problematic things appear.
Yes this stuff is obviously not going to be as good as a full MS Office install. That doesn't really matter though, because this clearly isn't intended to be an Office "killer" or whatever you want to call it. Google is going after the low hanging fruit - people who have relatively simple needs and would prefer a cheap option, particularly one that has the benefits of offsite backup and accessibility from everywhere. That's not everyone, indeed it is a small market segment, so its hardly going to put a dent in MS Office's market share. On the other hand it is, aparently, a big enough market segment that Google thinks they cna make money at it - and I would tend to agree with them. MS Office is overkill for a lot of small companies, and those same companies tend to be the ones that are less inclined to have full time IT staff to manage file servers, backups, and so on. Just because the product isn't perfect for everyone doesn't mean there isn't a market big enough to exploit. Not everything has to be about total market domination.