Why Google Should Embrace OpenOffice.org 277
CWmike writes "Preston Gralla has a decent idea that could move the office needle: If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, and sell support for the combined suite to small businesses, medium-sized business, and large corporations. Given the reach of Google, the quality of OpenOffice, and the lure of free, it's a sure winner. Imagine if a version of it were available as a Web service from Google, combined with massive amounts of Google storage. Integrated with Google Docs, it would also allow online collaboration. For those who wanted more features, the full OpenOffice suite would be available as a client — supported by Google. wouldn't be at all surprised to see this happen. Just yesterday, IBM announced that it was selling support for its free Symphony office suite. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Google doing the same for OpenOffice, after it integrates it with Google Docs."
What a stunning revelation... (Score:5, Interesting)
They could twin its codebase with their own corporate version [sun.com] and then the sky would truly be the limit.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't expect to go back to OOo until it has developed generations beyond what it is now.I certainly wouldn't start using Google Docs on that basis.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was a student, before getting assimilated by MS (I am now a MS employee), I ran Linux exclusively on my school laptop and used OpenOffice full time. There's no way around saying it, it was a terrible experience. When it wasn't crashing, losing my documents, or in some other way completely failing to function, it was painfully slow, bordering on unusable.
I stuck by it and fiddled with it until one day in a lab I had to do some extensive spreadsheet work. Specifically, getting data out of a tab-delimited file, approx 15,000 rows and ~5ish columns. Every way I could possibly attempt to open, paste, import this file would throw OpenOffice into a seemingly endless loop. I'd wait 20, 30, 40 minutes, but it couldn't handle this 100kB file no matter how I diced it. I made all sorts of excuses as other students were doing the same thing in mere seconds on their Windows PCs or Macs. It was the last straw for me and I gave up, and used the lab machine with MS Office to do the same thing in about 5 seconds. A similar lab experience only a few weeks later, and I ended up dual-booting my laptop "just for Excel", and before I realized it, I liked the whole Office suite better than OpenOffice. I still used Linux primarily at that time, but every time I needed anything remotely Office related, I simply found OpenOffice to be inadequate.
Sorry, I'm really not trying to be a troll about this, and I know many folks will scream bloody murder at me for even posting because of my bias. But before I had such a bias, I tried so very hard to love OpenOffice, and just couldn't. Like Wulfstan said, the quality of OpenOffice is just not very good.
If I were Google, I'd be working hard to carve out this niche market for online services and stay out of desktop apps beyond perhaps plugins for better online integration. OpenOffice doesn't fit with Google's business model, and frankly, I think Google could probably crank out something superior to OpenOffice from scratch anyways.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
And why would Google use OpenOffice to fill that gap when they could just improve Google Docs?
Whether Google can put these into their online Docs is a valid question, but it doesn't look easy.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd rather they developed a word processor... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am SO tired of every word processor out there, including the one by the white kool aid clan, mimicking the worst drawbacks of word because it makes it a bit easier to roundtrip documents to and from Word. I'd rather have the native format something like Docbook, but I'll take HTML if that's the only way to get real nested document structures and markup as THE native format.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm creating a screenplay/dialog management tool in it, and the regrettable thing is there is no stand-alone executable, and no way to simply run the finished files by end-users unless they have the full suite disk and then deselect installation of the other components.
Table linking is simplistic, but works. Similar to how FileMaker used to be.
Unfortunately, Approach has not got horizontal sliders for detail tables, but it has filters, constraints, and sliders. There is a large, vibrant end-users group at IBM and elsewhere:
http://jabrown.customer.netspace.net.au/approach/official.htm [netspace.net.au]
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ssforum.nsf/0/d361cd261211b1e485256e24004dcd75?OpenDocument&Click= [lotus.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Approach [wikipedia.org]
BTW, the form shown on the Wikipedia site does an injustice to the things the forms CAN do. It would be nice if
See:
http://www.bluechillies.com/details/9317.html [bluechillies.com]
See Built For Employees 1.0
SmartSuite has some 20+ application templates, numerous forms files... THAT is what BASE should have been emulating, but unfortunately, NIH syndrome STILL pervades, even after my circa-2001 pleas for them to peruse Lotus Approach. All we end up with is a hodgepodge of tepidly invented and release, hi-geekoid, no-beauty apps the make me feel my stomach was kicked in.
That's ANOTHER topic, but Open Source needs companies like IBM, Google, & Sun to shell out beautification money so Open Source developers can have their warez evaluated and transformed into wares. I dare say that most would-be converts are put off by sheer UGLINESS of many Open Source apps that never got any real polish for non-developers. Yeh, I know TheKompany has an app (Rekall), and they have some former Approach users, but their interface approach left me feeling I'd had a combination of Approach and Abscess melded. I would have stuck with Omnis's (since become Raining Data) stuff, but I hate the overhead, the licensing schemes, and the need to CODE to get done what I want to get done.
What somebody NEEDS to do is:
Take SQLite or MySQL as back ends and Lotus Approach's FRONT END for it's WYSIWYG interface, and update it to the CAPABILITIES but not the COMPLEXITY of FileMaker, and THEN, THEN, THEN Open Source will have a worthy database application for end-users who want to open all the current database files Approach can access, and have the ease-of-use of Approach...
(steps down from soap box)
I would rather buy MS Office than use OOo for free (Score:3, Interesting)
(And no, I won't try to help them make it better just because it's open source. I'm busy enough as it is with my own open source projects.)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:1, Interesting)
Java is definetelly one of main factors for its slowness. There isn't a single Java GUI program that doesn't suck majorly when it comes to speed and responsiveness.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
No. No its not. Google Docs isn't as full featured, and javascript in a browser isn't remotely as powerful or as flexible as what can be done with a native app either run locally, or even hosted via Citrix. There really is no comparison.
Now Google has no former experience or desire to go in application hosting business.
Really? I'll buy the no former experience, but pretty much everything they do lately is AJAX application hosting stuff.
They do have a lot of webserver on their disposal though and they can, without investing significant amount, host all sort of web applications (google docs included).
If they hosted 'real' applications instead of 'web applications' they could spare themselves all the trouble of actually WRITING web applications. All they'd have to do is write the application publisher... and for linux we ALREADY even have THAT in the form of remote X sessions; it just needs to be polished up a bunch to work over slow high latency WANs.
If I were at google, and I wanted to make 'online office'... who in their right mind would want to write an office suite from scratch in JAVASCRIPT to run in a variety of browsers that are all buggy to some degree and over which you have little control, and where standards compliance is a fantasy?
Especially when you could just take an existing free office suite, and the existing remote access provided by X-windows, and polish it up to run robustly and reliably over a WAN link. (And you KNOW this is possible because the guys over at Citrix have ALREADY done it.)
And when you are done, you have a solution that will work with practically ANY app. You want an online graphics program... publish gimp, you want an online ide? publish eclipse. You want an online mail program, publish evolution.
The ONLY downside to this solution is the cpu load on the server is higher. But if google figures they can scale up to give everyone on the planet gigabytes upon gigabytes of storage space, I think throwing CPUs at their network to give them some processing capability really shouldn't be an insurmountable problem for them.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)