No Office Suite Google 184
Simon (S2) writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin has quashed speculation that the giant ad broker is to introduce a web-based Office suite. "We don't have any plans," he told Web 2.0 conference organizer John Battelle (pictured below). However Brin left the door open a little. Documents would be easier to work with in the future, he promised, but he didn't think a fat client was the way to go. "I don't really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly," he told Battelle. However distributed thin web applications allowed you to do "new and better things than the Office package and more.""
Why Not? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know that many of us thought it would be the first direct attack against Microsoft,
WebNotepad? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting sort-of-semi-on-topic, shouldn't the headline be "No Google Office Suite"? What is up with the awkward word order?
And getting really on-topic, the announcement was to be expected. It would be unwise for Google to set up the infrastructure necessary to handle people's word processing. Such a device could be too easily abused, by say, programming macros and using Google's cycles to do general purpose computations on their dime. I'm sure there's a way around that particular issue, but it illustrates the inherent security risks of building web interfaces to massive software suites. Any exposed vulnerability will be exploited for processing power, or worse.
What good? (Score:4, Interesting)
Allowing people to collaborate on the same document online,is already possible in traditional office suites+groupware. And centralized storage of documents is avaliable via, you know, Yahoo Briefcase.
so what exactly would a web office suite bring to the table, aside from the coolness factor?
I agree. (Score:3, Interesting)
They're saying that the "office suite" in its current incarnation is not something they want to do. As Brin said, "I don't really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly." Because of all the media speculation, I think they will start making plans (that they don't have yet) for an office suite that (regular, not Slashdot) people are not used to. (Because, as peterprior mentioned above [slashdot.org], there is Writely.)
I expect a CmdrTaco "No OpenDocument support. Less space than an Emacs window. Lame" post soon.
The article was a joke... (Score:5, Interesting)
So let me give them fodder!
Distributing OpenOffice wouldn't be useful. What would be useful, imho:
Now, the trick is to tie them all together such that I don't need to ever exit google.com. For instance, I might want to include a picture from the internet into my presentation. I should be able to, for instance, click on something like "insert photo from internet" and be able to use google images to find the right picture. I should never have to save things to and from my computer (though it would be nice to have that ability if necessary!). I think between Yahoo's new mail interface that demonstrates drag-and-drop, and the impressive Google mapping features, there is a demonstrated availability of the necessary technology to implement at least a basic office suite.
Well, that's disappointing, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Plenty of room for that! (Score:1, Interesting)
1) Notes
2) Basic Documents
3) To Do Lists
4) Calendar Entries
Create a light csv viewer, manipulator
Create a DB client
Have a way to organize any sort of document.
Tab the interface with Google groups, Google Personal Search, Google Calendar, and Googles personal web page / blogger
#@$%%@#, a lot of people wouldn't need much else.
Re:Why Not? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then the industry can think about it.
Imagine a google 'document mangement, backup, revision control' product for your personal and office documents. Not to mention the sexy search.
Re:You are overestimating the effort (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What good? (Score:4, Interesting)
It would also move software out of pretending to be a product and back to being a service, where software belongs.
Maybe I'll just keep making weekend rants ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Aight here's the deal, last week my issue was with google being the next MS-Killer ... so this post is essentially right along those lines.
GOOGLE IS A COMPANY THAT DOES INTERNET APPLICATIONS MAINLY SEARCHING.
They're biggest competition is Yahoo, not microsoft. Let's see ... what company started off mainly as a search engine, then became a portal, started offering services that other sites did (Like driving directions, email, instant messaging, newsgroups, etc)? It wasn't microsoft, it was Yahoo.
People you've absolutely killing me here. First off people are google fan boys for no real apparent reason, like apple, they are a company whos main concern is to make money and as much of it as possible.
Hence, they are no different from any other for-profit company out there. End of story, google is no less "the man" than microsoft is. They are a company traded on the stock market, they are in the business not to change the world, but to ... let's here it ... MAKE MONEY.
Anyways, I hope that they keep the airconditioning on in your ivory tower...
I'm just happy that I can turn off the google story topic when I don't want to see what ELSE is happening in the world. So I'm not really going to blame slashdot here... I think the only one to blame for all my hostility is me, for actually cruising the google stories during the weekends.
Re:Damn slashdot submitters! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes folks, this bird was intended for everyone's favorite tech pundit.
The Power of the OpenDocument Approach (Score:4, Interesting)
As an example, my employer recently changed its name (again). It's really simple to write a little shell script to unzip filea, s/oldname/newname/g, and zip back up, without ever needing an 'office application' at all.
Google might want to use its server farm to gather information requested, and construct an *.od* on the fly to download to the user. After all, they already do it with HTML. It can't be all that difficult to do XML instead, and send the output to a compression program.
Re:Does it matter? No. (Score:4, Interesting)
What are you smoking? If it takes such an *enormous* effort to do, then how do you explain Writely [writely.com]? it's not like there is a massive software company with tons of resources behind it.
The truth is, AJAX based apps are *very* easy to write, since almost all of the important work has already been done for you by the browser. All you need to do is use JavaScript as the glue, and your favoirte language as the server-side processing backend for retrieval and storage.
Actually, it makes it easier to add features. You can entirely swap back-ends at will without touching the front-end, an vice-versa. You can add new features to the back end and have them be instantly available to all customers since it is web based. How could it get any easier? I don't understand your reasoning here.
Staggering? Hardly. Your standard Dell 2850 would be able to host tens of thousands of clients with this kind of web application. The server is doing *almost nothing*, all it has to do is serve a few requests and retirve and store documents. There is no back-end processing going on here. The front-end is doing the majority of the work, which is the rendering and editing of the document. If you think otherwise then you don't understand how these AJAX office applications work at a fundamental level.
The very idea that an office suite should require any kind of processing power at all is just the kind of nonsense Microsoft Office has lead you to believe. I shouldn't need a P4 with 1 GB of ram to write a text document with a few tables in it.
Online Office Does Exist (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not totally free in the way the gOffice dreamers would like it to be, but I must say I was pretty impressed with the interface (basically an Office 2000 clone but in your browser).
BTW, it's 100% Java so it works in Linux, Mac or whatever.
Link here: http://www.thinkfree.com/ [thinkfree.com]
Re:The Unofficial Web Applications List (Score:3, Interesting)
Writely and NumSum look useful, but they're closed source, and you have to give an e-mail address. If this is the future, count me out.