Google & Sun Planning Web Office 751
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."
Microsoft's Worst Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
Between Sun's passionate hatred of Microsoft and Google's competence, it's got to be a bad day over a Redmond.
Ahhh, the beauty of humility. (Score:5, Insightful)
"the world is about to change this week"
Yes, accessing applications on a remote server. That's certainly a new, world-changing idea.
Except that it isn't [webopedia.com].
Will be able to write a document without AdSense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two Years Later (Score:5, Insightful)
So I wonder how long until we can expect to see a similar service from Microsoft.
Blog (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, what? A post on some guys website, no some guys "blog" is now news? Who is this guy and why should we care what he has to say? His site is slashdotted.
This is so much worse that MS Office (Score:5, Insightful)
How could it be different? Well, Google would distribute their web apps *including* source code as bundles that could be installed on "personal servers" (like on the thousands of dedicated server companies run by smaller, generally independent shops http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dedicated+se
Think of it this way. How many corporations are going to start to standardize on Gmail? Not my company, and I'm happy for that. People, please see through this nonsense. Maybe we really do need the "click to download source" clause in the GPL v3. Otherwise, people will gladly give up their freedom just to see some lame company with an incredible data center suck away all of their freedom and privacy. Google is completely evil.
If they wanted to be good, the proof would be in enabling other people by opening their software stack and allowing for a much more distributed architecture.
The web browser is the new terminal. (Score:2, Insightful)
I like this type of technology from an infrastructure standpoint because it means you don't have to maintain 500+workstations worth of software and patches anymore. Welcome to the future kids!
Re:Microsoft's Worst Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft will do what it normally does: give it away for virtually free until the competition is destroyed or forgotten.
Now I am not saying it will be successful, but don't put it past Microsoft to start bundling MS Works in with Vista with the option to "upgrade" it to the full MS Office via a monthly $9.99 subscription. What else do they have to do with Works?
I will also admit this tactic is getting harder for them to pull off (Money vs Quicken, Media player vs iTunes, etc), but that does not mean they will not try.
Re:Google Conquers all (Score:1, Insightful)
Capitalist at heart (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will be able to write a document without AdSens (Score:5, Insightful)
If it lessens Microsoft's dominance, it's a working business model.
Dont Count on it changing the world yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Release all your numbers and words? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do law offices want to create all their documents online, hosted God-knows-where and visible to unknown techs with access to the servers? This would probably be a negligent breach of confidentiality in many cases.
With the exception of Slashdot, most people normally write docs and spreadsheets for a limited audience and would be uncomfortable not knowing who was reading it.
I'll keep a local copy thank you. But if I am on the road and need to do a small non-confidential thing quick, I might consider an online office product.
Why haven't I seen a comment yet ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Read again (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's not get ahead of the game. This is only if it takes off, which will be decided by the market and will sure be a slow process.
Besides, who wants to be deprived of all its documentation every time DSL is down?
Re:Google Conquers all (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the days of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, this practice was extremely annoying; you got half the screen filled with colour animated generic ads. Google proved that if you used targetted ads you could replace half a screen worth of ads with just one single group of text advertisements. I suspect they'll do something similar for an office suite, perhaps with the ads targetted to the content of your document.
Re:Google is officially evil (Score:2, Insightful)
In response to something that, had MS done it, you would have shrieked like a banshee, all you can come up with in argument is "a video game did it", and "Microsoft probably does it", and then some lame-ass strawman argument about Hawaii that insinuates that the US is a big bully. Your logic fails to impress...
Re:Microsoft's Worst Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
Matter of perspective. When you drop the large rock upon the sleeping gorilla, bloodying his nose but failing to kill it, who's going to have the worse day, you or the gorilla?
One thing's for sure, however: It'll sure get noisey inside the cage, and be entertaining as hell for anyone able to watch it from a safe distance...
Re:Read again (Score:5, Insightful)
How it should work (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll lose here. Google gives it's products away for actually free and is tons better at running an ad-based business than MS is. MS can't use their typical predatory pricing schemes to kill google, unless they start paying people to use their software.
Of course, they can always leverage their windows monopoly to try to do kill google. Still, if everything is web-based and platform agnostic, that will be harder than it used to be. The insidious bit is that google inherently runs on their software (IE), and there's nothing they can do to stop people from going to google's site. It's not like with Netscape, and they could pay OEMs to keep Netscape off the desktop.
Imagine a web-based office application that could be used from anywhere, and also allowed you to download a platform-agnostic (likely Java) offline editor. You could access your documents anywhere, take them with you, and edit them anywhere. Key to success would be a method of integrating the offline document when you bring it back online - integrated (but transparent and seamless) version control would be critical there.
Now HERE is where the real kicker is. Google could sell this system to companies so they could run it on their own network. Think MS Exchange for documents, only functional. This would inherently integrate backups, and it would allow tons of collaboration benefits that can only be dreamed of now. This is such a no-brainer I'm legitimately surprised MS hasn't done something like it.
I think this is doable. If they pull it off, it could seriously threaten MS.
Re:I wonder X or VNC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Read again (Score:1, Insightful)
Besides, who wants to be deprived of all its documentation every time DSL is down?
On the flip side, who wants an 'offline' version on their home computer (regular OpenOffice) and another version that can be accessed anywhere where there's a web connection? No worrying about whether the right software is available elsewhere like at the library to open your .odt files or whatever.
Re:This is so much worse that MS Office (Score:1, Insightful)
This product is perfect for the 15% of college students who can't afford the $20 educational license for Office... but it'd actually only be used by the %2 who don't know how to get a pirated copy either...
Re:What if? (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone already took an open source operating system and slapped a pretty GUI on it, that was Apple. But I agree, google might do the one thing Apple has left to do: be hardware independent.
I don't know about a Google OS, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google replaced all of our day-to-day software with complex AJAX sites, making us not need anything else, other than a browser and possibly a hard drive to save sensitive information. (everything else will probably be on Google's server, making it even easier to publish stuff you want to go public with)
The opportunity Google has with this, is you can have an entire workstation that is not only hardware independent, but Operating System independent as well. I can check gmail just fine in linux, windows, and MacOSX and have the same experience on all 3. Why not do something similar to that for all desktop applications?
Re:Two Years Later (Score:5, Insightful)
The browser is a crappy application platform. All the remote access methods (MS DHTML download behavior, hidden frames, XmlHttpRequest) are severly limited in functionality, especially error recovery and detection. Raise your hand if you've ever had sending an email in gmail screw up? The UI design decisions a browser makes to optimize the browsing of hypertext are totally different than the ones you make when you're create an application, especially an office suite. Web applications have a couple notable benefits, combined with some signifigant flaws. The major advantages are remote access and ease of installation/support. Disadvantages include, but are not limited to, more difficult cross platform development (yes, really: it's harder to get complicated DHTML behaviors working in multiple browsers than a regular application, and it's complicated by being hard to reliably detect your platform), lack of local file access, limited UI customization possible (have to roll your own drag & drop, limited context menu support), no integration into the desktop (standard menu shortcuts hit the browser, not the application), and a limited widget set to work from.
Theres a good reason why people moved away from thin clients. People are slowly moving back, for a variety of reasons, and there *are* good reasons to do it, but until someone (Microsoft in Vista?) develops a standard and widely deployed remote application host, which is *not* a web browser, AJAX and web applications are going to remain underdeveloped and overhyped. Look to Java Web Start for inspiration (if only Java apps weren't so crappy...)
Re:What if? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google could just ensure that their test team is testing major vendor's hardware like Dell, HP, etc. After all, if you're talking about business and joe user functionality, you don't need to focus on 3D acceleration and such.
Google could just sink their cash into Novell/SuSE, RedHat, or Mandriva and provide a bundle that already works. Oh, wait, that's right -- you can already get Linux bundles with Java, OO/SO, etc.
So what's the "new" aspect you're suggesting, other than Google becoming involved in the marketing and distribution? What precisely is it that we need for a desktop GUI that isn't already in KDE and/or Gnome? 3D alpha-transparency spinners? Corona effects for the "glint" off metallic 3D lettering?
What Google could really provide in this area is some funding to improve the hardware support and configuration/maintenance utilities for components like configuring 3D support, adding/removing software, etc. I'm not talking about yet another front-end for RPM or APT, but some real improvement in reducing dependencies and manageability.
Ad-based online office applicaton (Score:2, Insightful)
How in the world would something like this get past corporate legal teams? I would worry about a massive leak of intellectual property or other sensitive information if the document I was working on is being evaluated for content across the public internet...there is no privacy in an application like this. Even if the data is encrypted, Google could potentially have a copy of every document and change to every document I write even if I never actually save it to Google's servers. How is this any better than spyware or keystroke loggers? No way they would make money off something like this in the corporate world, and I personally would never use it on my home system either.
Re:Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
[mumbles]how is parent moded +5 Insighful ? Gotta metamod more frequently[/mumbles]
Not when the idea has already been done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that if I discovered the secret of eternal youth, then that wouldn't change the world, simply because it's not a new idea, people have been looking for it since the dawn of time?
No. The difference in your (poor) analogy is that people were searching for the secret, but did not find it, whereas you did. With respect to client-server technology, it has been done for years already. Thus, implementing an office suite over the Internet is no different than implementing it over, say, a LAN. The "secret" has already been found.
Just because it's already been thought of doesn't mean that an implementation won't potentially be interesting.
I didn't say it wasn't interesting. I said it wasn't new.
Content security? (Score:2, Insightful)
As a company I would be worried about [1] customer information [2] my own intellectual property (process methodologies, templates, whatever) [3] confidential information (strategies, minutes), being processed on some third-party site.
NOTE: Some of the above content does flow unencrypted over internet e-mail when sent to external domains. But then mailing such documents to an external domain is unusual and is (or can be) monitored.
- YoGiX
Re:Google Conquers all (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blog (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Google Conquers all (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft's Worst Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, the tin-foil hat crowd (about 1% of users) might care about that, as might business owners with valuable trade secrets (30%?).
But Mikey's term paper on Otters [theonion.com] is not so critical. Parents don't want to buy Office XP Pro for that. Pirate it from, maybe. But a dedicated purchase for domestic use? No.
Microsoft (hotmail), Google (gmail), as well as Yahoo and others have proven that a great number of people don't mind compromising their privacy with casual use of free email accounts.
Free, web-based documents doesn't seem too much of a stretch.
A firmer barrier to web-based use of Office tools is spreadsheets. Business owners have absolutely no interest in placing their crown jewels on someone else's server no matter the low price and convenience. But even home users would think twice about putting their checkbooks or 401k histories on someone else's server.
A service like this needs the option of (i) free easy access for any consumer, then (ii) the ability for business owners to lock down their own web-based office document servers, use SSL/TLS, etc.
MS could play in this space very competently, but it would be cannibalizing its lucrative revenue stream for shrink-wrapped Office, so it would have to overcome a great deal of apprehension: a classic Innovators Dilemma.
Re:This is so much worse that MS Office (Score:4, Insightful)
You're missing the point of the original post, which is that the product is based on OpenOffice.Org, which is released (I believe) under the GPL.
The idea of the GPL was to give everyone an equal opportunity. With the increasing number of services based on Free Software with slight modifications and then released as a web service, the GPL becomes a de-facto BSD license, which wasn't the purpose.
There's discussion in the Free Software community to rectify this problem by requiring ASPs, if they make changes to code that's under the GPL, to be required to release those changes, in the same way they would if they'd given the code away in binary form.
For the user, this is the same situation. If I get a copy of a binary or I use a web site, it's the same effect, as distribution. Therefore the GPL3 may include a clause to require the same effect of giving a binary as making a service.
It took me a long time to appreciate why this was necessary, but with this latest announcement, I think it is.
Re:Read again (Score:5, Insightful)
Not forgetting, of course, that all this is based on AJAX. That is, HTML, CSS, Javascript/ECMAScript, which aren't "owned" by any one vendor. The day Google starts producing (i) the majority web-browser browser with (ii) proprietary extensions is the day we have to worry in the slightest about vendor lockin.
And the day Google habitually charges a subscription fee for any of its mainstream services (go on, name one) is also the day we can even start worrying about them becoming the next Microsoft here.
This isn't about vendor-lockin. This is about taking away Microsoft's competitive get-out-of-jail-free card, their monopoly over the majority development API (the Windows API).
Once a full-featured (hell, even half-way decent) MS Office compatible office suite doesn't need the Windows API, there's no hard requirement for most businesses to use Windows. In fact, the ease of adminning/free-ness/lack of installation requirements of a web app means there are very compelling reasons to make the switch.
The reasons Star/OpenOffice haven't taken off are:
(i) Marketing: Nobody (apart from us geeks) has really heard of them.
(ii) Trust: Very few companies have the kind of big-name-brand trust CEOs (erroneously) have for Microsoft).
(iii) Hassle of administration: There are no practical obvious admin advantages in switching from one desktop app to another.
However:
(i) Everyone and his grandma have heard of Google these days, and they could (should they wish to) likely amass a marketing budget on the same scale as Microsoft's, at least for one product launch.
(ii) Google, although a relative newcomer, is now sufficiently ubiquitous and useful that it's rapidly gaining (if it hasn't already) big-name-brand recognition.
(iii) Switching from a desktop app to a web app, however, is a no-brainer. Especially for overworked and underfunded IT departments the world over.
Re:What if? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Google was to release something, it would be smartest to release something that works on Windows, Linux and OS X. Let the support for the OS, where the biggest headaches come from, to someone else. That makes the most business sense to me.
Yeah, wow... you must feel stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
much ado about nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
As part of the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in downloads of the Java Runtime Environment from Java.com,
mkay great, but why is this newsworthy?Not quite Google Office Yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
It'll be interesting to see if this helps Sun get Java on more Windows desktops. I'm sure it will help get more OpenOffice installations out there, but (and here comes the karma killing part), I'm not sure that is an instant win for OpenOffice, nor is it the "death knell" for Microsoft Office either.
This is a big test for OpenOffice with a more general audience, and MS Office has done a lot to standardize the office suite interface, and I think OpenOffice is proof of that (it looks and feels like MS Office, and that's not a bad thing). But, it will be interesting to see if the rougher edges in OO are polished off enough to get people to switch and stay.
As for switching from MS Office, that's a harder battle. MS has got some compelling stuff in the way of collaboration and established training. Also, Office is often a interesting platform for third-party development. I think MS has got a few tricks up it sleeve yet. I think MS is trying to establish and solidify its very broad corporate base.
As for home, well, it will be interesting to see how MS responds there. For one, one could expect an expansion of "Work at Home" licenses for companies to get their employees MS Office at home for cheap.
Frankly, I don't want MS Office to die. I don't want to be forced into using OpenOffice any more than being forced to use MS Office, but now, if I had to choose, I'd got with the one with the long track record. (Eek! I said it. The flames await me.)
Maybe this is how it will work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe the applications are downloaded, cached to your hard drive. So whenever you go to, for the example, the word processor, it simply loads up what is already cached on your drive first. If you're online, then it will check for updates to the program. If you're not online, then you just use the word processor in your browser window like any other offline word processor.
As for your personal documents, perhaps you can save files to your own system and will have the option to save to an online folder. The attraction to save online would be to have your documents accessible from whatever Internet-enabled computer you use, and for online collaboration.
Re:Microsoft could easily kill this (Score:5, Insightful)
This would not be a game that Microsoft would want to play since they could spend a ton of effort only to see their hole patched without anybody even noticing. Not to mention that since Google relies on widely used features that are support by many browsers, breaking a Google web app will likely break many other web apps. The providers of these other apps probably don't have the resources to patch IE problems as quickly as Google does. So that could be another dangerous risk to take, suddenly giving IE a reputation of breaking lots of random websites every time you do a Windows Update. Those same sites will probably work just fine in Firefox or Opera and the providers of those apps will suddenly have a very good reason to advertise this fact!
Re:What if? (Score:3, Insightful)