Google Office Still in the Wings?

Rob writes "Ajax Office, a proposed project to create an open source, web-based suite of office applications, has fallen by the wayside. But the project's founder Paolo Massa is convinced that not only will there be successful open source projects in the space, but that it is only a matter of time before the likes of Google or Yahoo! launch a web-based office suite of their own - going up against Microsoft Office but in the online sphere. "If you think about it, it would mean having access to your office documents from any browser," he told Computer Business Review, outlining his view that a provider could enable the creation and storage of office documents on their web servers. "I think someone will do this within a year," he said."

It was called myWebOs

[rylin]

http://www.communitytechnology.org.nyud.net:8090/d atabases/screenshots/mywebos.gif [nyud.net]

Now this is interesting.

[jeffs72]

Personally, I haven't paid for a copy of office in something like, uh. Well, I've never paid for a copy of office actually. But would I be willing to pay some sort of subscription fee type deal for not only an office type app suite, but one that while I was at work I could get to my home documents, or on vacation, etc?

You bet your software pirating ass I would! Provided it was SSL enabled anyway, one thing that chaps my hide is that all these free email clients don't have any security on them. That sort of keeps me from using goggle mail for anything but fluff email.

But a full blown web office suite that was an online repository for my data. That's smart. I really hope that someone can get this to production, and have an easy was to do an import of old office stuff that actualy works without losing formatting and whatnot.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Am I the only one ... ?

[SamSeaborn]

Am I the only one who thinks the richness of interfaces you can build with AJAX is being blown way out of proportion?

If I was going to implement "Google Office" I would do it with Java Swing or maybe Macromedia Flex. The idea of implementing an Office suite with HTML, Javascript, and AJAX sounds like the makings of one nasty, ugly, kludgey mess of a GUI.

Sam

google should buy 37 signals

[pubjames]

By far the best on-line applications are made by 37 Signals [37signals.com]. Google should just buy them - makes much more sense than some of the other stuff they've brought recently and would probably be much cheaper.

Re:Am I the only one ... ?

[rishistar]

One option could be to have the UI and many operations could be done in Java....that way the user has the choice of a matching desktop version or the web-based version with the same code base. The main difference would be one of File I/O.

Minus side is you loose the light-weightness of Ajax.

Forget Word

[pubjames]

To make the next step in office development suites, we really must completely forget about how Microsoft Word works!

OpenOffice and the other open source office suites all hold themselves back terribly by trying to deal with the Microsoft formats and copying the interface. Guys, doing it that way you will always be playing a frustrating game of catch-up, and you'll never take off.

The next generation office suites I believe will (should) be 1) web based, 2) simple 3) have collaboration built in from the roots.

Come on guys, just stop copying Microsoft Office. It's boring, time consuming and doomed to fail. To compete with Microsoft, forget them.

Adwords in Office?

[G4from128k]

Although I'm sure that Google could do this, its not clear that Google will want to do this. Where's the money? Would Google ads appear in the margins of all my documents while I work on them? Would people accept that intrusion? Would people actually click through? I know that the vast majority of the Office document work that I do would generate $0 revenue for Google because very little of it relates to buying stuff. And for people that work in offices, most of them have little buying authority, so adwords sold on the Office site would be a loser for advertisers.

As much as some people (myself included) would love for Google to kill MS, its not clear that Google has a business rationale for entry into the Office market.

Re:Now this is interesting.

[ergo98]

There are amazing technologies like VPN and remote desktop that allow one to access their documents, and even a rich GUI, from anywhere. If I can access some online office service, then I can likely access my own machines just as easily.

Trying to create an office suite in a web browser with DHTML & "AJAX" would be ridiculous - the office suite will be the last thing overtaken by web apps, and by then the standards will have evolved such that it won't be HTML, but rather X Windows or RDP. Speaking of that - When is Google going to start offering rich X-type sessions to their apps? I'll bet it's sooner rather than later. Everything old is new again, everything under the sun.

corporate network appliance

[cerelib]

To me this does not sound like a plausible commercial idea as of yet. The one place I do see this as being possibly successful would be the corporate sector. You could just buy a small server that ran everybodies office application on the corporate intranet. No need for massive amounts of installs and it would have some interesting ways of document sharing.

Re:Fantastic!

[grahamlee]

From my experience, large system-like java applets work HORRIBLE through the web browser due to huge lag times and usually sloppy programming.

Whatever did happen to the applet version of Wordperfect? That was supposed to bring us this beautiful lag back in 1995.

Besides, you would want it to "just work", not have it dependent on a JRE installed.

Eventually, even when considering such a thin-client architecture you still have to make some assumptions about what said client is. If it's running Sun Java, you need to know what version of the JRE is installed so you know which language features you may safely target. Maybe that's not what you want, you just want to give everyone X terminals and let them run X clients on your server...OK, which extensions does the X server on the terminal have? Maybe it should be implemented in JavaScript, OK, how fat a pipe do you need to push down components of an office app in quasi-realtime, and what sort of compute power do you need to run it in a responsive fashion? You didn't use any proprietary extensions to JavaScript, did you?

In my opinion the "safe" ways to roll a platform-independent app out to everyone are to use a completely server-side web application platform or to program in APIs which are available to every client. The NeXT/Sun collaboration on OpenStep came close to implementing the second, but Java is a reasonable approximation.

Re:No Thanks

[div_2n]

(If only they could get vba in it)

Do you mean MS VB or just general VB? Because it's already there. I've written macros with it before. Granted in version 1.x the programming environment and documentation was beyond crappy. I haven't explored it in the 2.x beta.

Re:How can I trust the company hosting my document

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really want government officials, Masters and PhD students, top scientists and engineers, buisnesses (and business employees) etc... to send mail over the internet?

That will never ever happen. Think of the security! What if some hacker hacks away and downloads tons of sensitive letters?

Clearly the only sensible option is to send mail on paper via the postal service, anything else would be madness.

As for Google Mail, we've seen the way they index all the information you post to the public internet.

Imagine a service in the future offered by Google that gives employers the tool to find out more information on a specific person, just by typing your name into a box! Clearly if they started a mail service they'd do the same thing and make all the letters you store with them publicly available to anyone that asks for it.

Six years ago, I was too stupid to realize that Google will be able to search every nook and cranny of the Internet, and now everytime I go for a job they find out I used to abuse message boards under the nick l33t w4nx0r and now I have to post anonymously all the time. Its an invasion of privacy I tells ya.

Think Out of the Box

[tmortn]

I see a awful lot of comments about how people would preffer to keep their data local or how the browser is just to limited to really use for an office system of any sophistication but no consideration of other options. Like for example having the option of not storing your documents online... or storing them both on and off line. There are other options to either/or scenarios.

I can't argue that web browsers are terribly limited in this respect though. Which is why I really think the answer is the next generation. There is a theory floating about that google is considering a web providing service... sometimes called a parrallel internet. Well how would one access it? How about portal software? Something similar to AOL but something truly unique under the hood instead of being a cheezy skin over default system utilities? IE Google makes its own browser system that includes HTML rendering but which also goes beyond. Something similar to Google Earth only instead of rendering a 3d globe it is a system designed for word processing and spreadsheets. With a large offline component that also uses online functions as needed... and perhaps caches the most commonly accessed ones to speed up the process and to deal with Lag. It may even allow for a full offline functionality that syncs up with its online counterpart as available.

Even without a new 'browser' per say lets just say that Google Office is similar to Google Earth. The on and off line components are blended in and toss in a embedded firefox component that you can switch to if so desired for one stop shopping... IE tabs that include your office documents your working on as well as your net windows... system command line ? MP3 playing ? file browser ? its not to long before your talking about an OS portal... then if you make something like a Knoppix distro for sampling it and allow a full install you can design a system from the ground up to blur the line between on and off line in a way that really has yet to happen for the masses. They can use Windows install base as a stepping stone. If they can get to where people are just using windows to access the google progs then a full up OS replacement may then be possible on a scale that would have Blamer tossing a few more chairs around.

Maybe they could improve basecamp

[mgkimsal2]

I just had a listener post his experieneces with web-based project management, and basecamp was among those he tried, with not a very good opinion of it. Based on the few remarks about basecamp, I'm rather surprised that a company so apparently publicly devoted to 'usability' overlooked such basic things.

http://fireboxstudios.com/news/newapp [fireboxstudios.com]

Re:theft and breakage

[erlenic]

I agree completely on that. I just recently bought a used laptop for school. $300, 600Mhz, 320MB RAM, 12GB HD. Runs Windows XP, OpenOffice, and even Visual Studio 2003 with no problem. In fact, VS runs just as fast as on the 2.8 Ghz machines at school.

Re:Now this is interesting.

[HermanAB]

Hmm, but what difference does it make? The mail was sent to you in plain text over thousands of kilometers of unprotected internet wiring. Why bother encrypting the last little bit?

Those Think Geek Ts that says: "I read your email", are true you know.

Re:So far so 1996

[Zebra_X]

Thin, web-based clients have been a good idea for a long time

This is a terrible idea (It's also not really thin client).

Here are a couple scenarios: Internet down? OH CRAP, I just lost my work. Internet Down, "Ah, the word processor is down". CRAP I just hit the back button.

Ideas like this can learn a little bit from the emergence and acceptance of services like Vonage. It layers complexity onto a currently reliable system - Vonage customers experience downtime on average 20 minutes a day, usually at peak hours. Can you imagine how mad you would be if your phone stopped working at peak hours? With VoIP we're more tolerant becuase it's more complicated. It would not be the case with Bell South, Verizon, SBC, QWest or any of the other carriers.

The same goes for a web office suite. Adding the requirement of an internet connection to run the software (and not just a dial up connection) introduces reliability issues in an otherwise pretty reliable system. When you have the option of having an always available, stable, fast software suite on your pc, ready to go to work at anytime or the possibility of headaches equivalent to 1998 PC or Mac crashes which is better?

So apart from the fact that your future web enabled office suite is going to be less reliable than your current suite let's consider speed. An SSL'd version of an Ajax app is going to be slow. It will be noticably slow. Basic things like typing will be fine but operations like spell checking, saving loading, any sort of wizard operation. Moving data between the browser and the server is not a fast operation in ajax.

Why make it more complicated than it needs to be?

Bad Idea

[RAMMS+EIN]

This is a bad idea for 2 reasons.

The first reason is from a technology point of view. It's possible to kludge together webpages so that the illusion of an interactive application, but it will be just that; a heap of kludges. With our super fast PCs, it works just about fast enough for simple interactions, provided the latency to the server is not too high. In 20 years of networked GUIs, no good standard for interactive remote user interfaces has emerged; X is too verbose, HTML is too static, and PicoGUI seems to have died.

The second, and probably more important, reason is from a user point of view. You don't want to have your documents only accessible to a program on some other organization's computer. It's bad enough when the documents you store on your own computer are in a proprietary format you're not allowed to know how to process; not even having access to the documents without intermission of a 3rd party is much, much worse. Not just because of the huge potential for lock-in, but also because of the reliability and security aspects.

Re:Forget Word

[HermanAB]

Sometimes a pencil and eraser can't be beat. I once figured out a set of small look-up tables for a LFSR error correction system using a pad of block paper - almost used the whole pad before I had it figured out, but there was no way to do that on a computer, it would just have been too cumbersome.

Stupid idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay $7.95 a month for a gig of server space from a reasonably reliable host. If I cared about having my documents available everywhere I went, I would put them there. If I didn't have that, I would put them on a CD, a flash drive, or a floppy disk and carry it with me.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but an online office suite sounds like a really stupid idea. What's the benefit over a regular office suite, a cheap host and an ftp client?

I really wish people would remember that just because you can do something, doesn't make it a good idea.

We are already working on

[mrL1nX]

an open-source Office Suite with my company. We have been planning for a long time and we have started work on our word processor , calendar , address book & slideshow.