Google & Sun Planning Web Office

astrab writes "According to this post at Dirson's blog, Google and Sun Microsystems are to announce a new and kick-ass webtool: an Office Suite based on Sun's OpenOffice and accesible with your browser. Today at 10:30h (Pacific Time) two companies are holding a conference with more details, but Jonathan Schwartz (President of Sun Microsystems) claimed on Saturday on this post of his blog that "the world is about to change this week", predicting new ways to access software."

Re:Google Conquers all

[digThisXL]

Direct link to press conference site live at 1:30pm EST [sun.com]

Re:Microsoft's Worst Fear

[MPHellwig]

According to MS and SUN, they are friends now.
According to others, SUN doesn't take the extra effort to make there x64 hardware Windows imcompatible and MS won't do the extra effort to brake their OS more on SUN h/w then on the others.
That said, of course they would do anything in there power to at least equalize the software market a bit. It's easier to be competitive if the market is open.

Re:Wow

[KingSkippus]

They may be developing an ulcer, but as we established in the previous front page article [slashdot.org], it would be due to H. Pylori, not stress...

Nevertheless, I agree. OpenOffice for the Web? Brilliant!

How is this new?

[CarlHall]

Lotus had this worked out in the late 90's with a product called eSuite (think Lotus SmartSuite written in Java for a thin client). eSuite was profitable but didn't make enough money for IBM after the assimilation so it was dropped as a product line.

StarPortal

[martinicus]

Sun have had this technology for 5 years...it was called StarPortal, and then Sun One Web Top as Sun's marketing people renamed it to their latest buzzword compliant version. I bet the new version will be something like 'JWS' - Java Web System.

It is essentially a Java encapsulation of Star/Open Office accessible through a browser. Pretty cool stuff, but involved some hefty Java downloads (~100MB?) to get it started up. Once started up though, it was almost identical to using a native version of Star/Open Office.

Marty

Re:Google is officially evil

[PortHaven]

If I understand it correctly, Taiwan was where the "old" government of China that we were allied with during WWII relocated too.

Re:Google is officially evil

[1u3hr]

Google makes Taiwan a province of China in order to appease China and avoid being denied access to China's markets. Google makes Taiwan a privince of China

If you look at that story, you find it's a complaint from the "Taiwan Solidarity Union", a nationalist group that proposes independence for Taiwan. Though Taiwan is in effect an independent country, it has always been officially, according to both its own and the Beijing government, a province of China. They differ though on what "China" is. Taiwan sees it as the "Republic of China", whose government in exile is "temporarily" in Taipei; Beijing as the "People's Republic of China", ruled by the communists. Only in the last few years have any Taiwanese politicians dared to advocate legal independence, and Beijing is very quick to rattle the sabres about this.

Traffic alert!

[pete_norm]

I guess those guys http://www.goffice.com/ [goffice.com] will wonder why their traffic has gone up all of the sudden...

Re:Google is officially evil

[mrtroy]

IDIOT.

Taiwan is NOT a province of China.

All the latest Chinese government did was "free" them from the Japanese rule (which wasnt a pleasant time either), but instead of actually liberating the Taiwanese, the Chinese did the exact same as what the Japanese were doing! They kept marital law in place, killed many familes, and basically treated Taiwan like shit.

Who are you to make such a bold and infuriating statement to any Taiwanese? Have you even visited the island? Have you spoke with anyone who was alive during this oppression?

Auto-save

[DevanJedi]

Gmail introduced auto-save as a feature yesterday which makes a tremendous amount of sense in the context of an office app. The feature autosaves your email as you type, once a minute or so. Then, if your browser crashes or something and you go back to Gmail, your autosaved email is under 'Drafts'. Sounds like a must-have for AJAX office.

Re:How it should work

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a program from bentley software called ProjectWise, which is a document container for the office, can be set up to access across the internet. It works for any filetype you care to throw at it, MS Office, Acrobat, flash, cad, etc. Now something like that that doesn't require maintenance, er, "protection fees". would be rather nice.

Re:Microsoft's Worst Fear

[Tibor the Hun]

Not necessarily.
Google makes products that work the best on MS platforms.
Google Earth - MS only,
Google Talk - MS only, but thanks to Jabber other OSs can piggyback.
Google Desktop Search - MS only (IE 5.5 +)

All this talk about the mighty Goog toppling "Micro$haft" is pretty pointless, as it seems that google's code is not all that portable over different OSs and browsers.

It's like a parasite, you want to exploit the advantages of your host (being installed on 90 % of world's computers), but you don't want to kill it.

Re:Google is officially evil

[Eslyjah]

Mod parent down. While it is true that Taiwan has not formally declared independence, the Republic of China is different than the People's Republic of China. ROC=Taiwan, PRC=China. This is misinformative.

Re:Two Years Later

[Anonymous Coward]

Thousands of IT people around the world are loosing their jobs as s

For fuck's sake, why do so many people have trouble spelling "losing" correctly.

Look, here's a simple technique. There are two words with different spellings: "lose" and "loose". Look at the two spellings. Which one sounds like "goose". Is it the four-letter version? That doesn't seem likely. So now we know that "loose" sounds like "goose".

Say it after me. "Loose as in goose". Is that clear?

Sun is doing it...

[JavaLord]

What if, behind closed doors at Google they're working on an OS? An OS that's based on Linux, yet with the UI and ease-of-use similar to OSX

Sun is working on project looking glass Which is linux based, and the UI is similar (and maybe even a bit cooler) than osx. Check out the screenshots [sun.com]

Re:What if?

[labratuk]

you could even make your own API instead of using X-windows if you really wanted to.

Why would you want to abandon one of the best features the unix desktop has?

WOW..Tremendous Letdown!

[MEGAGatchaman]

Meh.. All that conjecture and just another corporate alliance. http://www.sun.com/2005-1004/feature/index.html [sun.com] Wake me up when Steve Jobs et al, join the mega-collective also.. G~

Well, that was a HUGE letdown

[artemis67]

I was a little late to the webcast, but the gist is that Google and Sun are in the beginning stages of forming a partnership that begins with something about Java integration in the Google Toolbar (didn't catch all of that) and Google buying a lot of Sun servers. Whatever.

In the Q&A session, Eric Schmidt says that they will *assist* in the distribution of OpenOffice (whatever that menas), but that they are *not* announcing a new product (i.e., Google Office).

I think that the blog community got way, way ahead of this story.

Re:What if?

[mcrbids]

What if, behind closed doors at Google they're working on an OS?... on x86 machines it will be able to run Windows software.

Pie, meet sky. Microsoft can barely come up with something that runs Windows software! What makes you think that Google, with a bare fraction of the resources of Microsoft could do it?

Having a Java/OSS "OpenOffice" would be fun. Click a link. Wait 40 minutes for Swrite.jar to download. Open file. Click save. Wait 2 minutes while the file gets uploaded over your 128k upstream DSL. Yuck.

"The network IS the computer" still has a long way to go, a few examples:

1) Kerberos uses symetric encryption. Why? Nothing like having all the credentials for all your users in PLAINTEXT on a server - if it gets hacked, all your security is HOSED and you get to re-issue passwords to anybody who MIGHT have been logged in... this is just lame.

2) X works great - on a LAN with near unlimited bandwidth. Introduce true Internet speeds, and it sucks balls pretty fast. Also, you have to tunnel it over ssh or something, otherwise your security sucks. And, everybody "knows" that you don't leave ports 6000+ open, otherwise you're open to all kinds of attacks. (Oops! Your network transparency just became network opaque!)

3) Ever try to run NFS over the Internet... SECURELY?!?! Its host-based security model is piss-poor, and performance is second to just about anything else.

4) OpenLDAP is a true, pain in the ass to use. Ever try modifying a schema for an OpenLDAP server? Having to dump/reload the entire LDAP DB be cause you change a single field is truely CRAPTACULAR.

5) Java is awesome for hardware abstraction - but where's the OSS version? What is there out there that's OSS and provides equivalent functionality? When do I get to get a java release via yum, as part of my OS install CD?

6) When do I get to mix objects in PHP, Perl, C, and Java into a single codebase? PHP is my language of choice for most of my work, but sometimes I'd just LOVE to something in C to get some improved performance, or maybe take a perl class and access it directly from PHP... Since there's not a standards organization everybody pays any attention to, this kind of functionality just won't happen anytime soon...

7) When will I be able to mix/match objects? Why can't I instantiate a software object in C or PHP on a remote system, such that the object occupies memory on THAT system instead of THIS one, and have it all work? Why can't we have a "network aware" process model?

Don't get me wrong - OSS is awesome, I type this on my Dell Inspiron laptop running Fedora Core Linux, (and I'm happy to use it!) - but acknowledging your weaknesses is the first step to fixing them.

Nothing To See Here

[fupeg]

Turns out it's just a distribution deal. Downloading the Java JRE will give users the option to also download the Google toolbar. Similarly, the Google toolbar will eventually give users the option to download OpenOffice. There was some hintint at future collaborations between the two companies, but that's it for now.