GDocs vs. ThinkFree vs. Zoho vs. MS Office 226
CWmike writes "Web-based productivity suites, once almost a contradiction in terms, have become real challengers to desktop applications. Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps. The question is: Are these three applications really ready to take on a desktop-based heavy hitter like Microsoft Office?"
eh (Score:1, Insightful)
No!
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you honestly think a business is going to allow its private correspondence to be handled over the Internet by one of these programs? Unless the company has nothing it would like to hide from its competitors, this isn't going to happen. There is too much fear of corporate spying.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not alone... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:File format!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
because it isnt sufficiently interoperable with MSoffice.
Wait a second... Lets see, I can save an item in OOo and I can open it up in Office and still get all the text just fine. I can use a saved file from Office and open it up in OOo and still get all the text just fine. However, I can take a saved file from Office 2003 and open it up in Office XP which should be compatible, but wait... The file from Office 2003 looks totally different on Office XP! But aha! I have Office 2003 installed on my laptop... But wait! It looks different on there then on the Office 2003 at work!
Face it. Even Office isn't good at being sufficiently interoperable with Office. But that hasn't killed Office... Yet.
My objection exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Same objection I always had with GMail.
Google is then in charge of your data.
I don't care if google is staffed exclusively by Ophanim (closest rank of angels to god), I'm not willing to trust a third party with my stuff, and neither should any self respecting company.
Re:Are we serious here ? (Score:3, Insightful)
And the performance of any RIA will depend on your browser's javascript implementation. That's why I use Webkit as much as possible.
Litmus test (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:eh (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL...
Assuming that you (the AC) are WillyHill, you are becoming as disturbing of a thought as Twitter himself is.
The links above are circumstantial evidence of the ownership of each account.
WTF?
Epic shill threads
FTW?
Due to trolling, this journal entry has comments disabled. If you would like to report a new account, just post on one of my open JEs
TFW?!
Are you building a civil case over this? Or are you going to start a Not-For-Profit Twitter Reduction Organization, Or are you just trying to invoke some sort of Slashdot method to delimitate user accounts, perhaps a mandatory subscription? Is there a newsgroup, or a website in the making?
You can't stop "Twitters" by imposing more rules, you just make them more devious, and by creating such "following" of him/it/them you are solidifying his position as The Most Infamous Troll On Slashdot and most likely if not certainly making him more eager to continue, notice how he seems to be picking up the pace with new accounts? there's what like 8 or so vvillyhill/wiIIyHiII/wlliyhill accounts now... you are feeding the problem, unless of course, you actually are the problem, and a little more adept shilling method, pretend to combat your own trolling or something.
How hard is it to mod him down, or to roll the wheel on your mouse past his comments?
Re:easier way to quit emacs (Score:5, Insightful)
... and then remember that you had another emacs session open in another terminal.
Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
No indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, which is it? Never, or not for a while? :)
Well, 10 years ago we couldn't imagine anything like YouTube, and the idea of streaming media was almost laughable back when most people had dial-up. The very idea of a browser on a cell phone would have been seen as impossible, and a phone that would be driven purely by a touch screen was the stuff of science fiction and would have cost $1000 easily. 10 years ago, Linux on the desktop seemed like something that was impossible. 10 years ago, a $200 desktop or a $300 laptop would have been looked at as if it was a scam. Yet today just about everyone visits YouTube, uses streaming media, and nearly every phone has a browser, and the iPhone has been a success and now only costs $200 (well more if you count in what expensive plan AT&T tries to put you on). Linux is pre-installed on many laptops and desktops today, and we have the $200 gPC and a $300 EEE PC. So, when I say, for a while, it means that today it sounds impossible, but 5-10 years from now, we might all be using it.
Re:eh (Score:3, Insightful)
This article/discussion is not Open Office vs MS Office. It's about whether web based apps are ready for prime time. I know /. commenters are expected to go off the headline only, then spout their opinions without regard to validity, but come on. At least keep your fanboi comments related to discussions that pertain to Open Office. (BTW, I use it, I just don't think it's better than MS Office, only cheaper.) This isn't even open vs. closed discussioin. It's web 2.0 vs locally installed software. Webapps vs (PickOne: MS Office, WP Office, or OO)
Re:eh (Score:1, Insightful)
Twitter has a long way to go to be the most infamous poster on slashdot. The worst and hence most infamous trolls on slashdot are the paid to post losers. If you pay attention to them you can even start to readily recognise the different sources. Generally the better ones are sitting in tech company offices posting whilst at work with a distinct bias to their place of work. Next up are a swag of US government propagandist, from better to worse, US government intelligence agencies (NSA>FBI and bottom of the barrel CIA), US government military (air force> navy>army and bottom of the barrel the marines) and of course the worst of the worst party political hacks (democrats>libertarians and bottom of the barrel republicans). However it is all a part of slashdot and not too bad as long as it is somewhat amusing.
When will people realize that it doesn't matter what agendas a poster has as long as the points are good? Saying anything else is just ad hominem.
If a poster says "Software X is bad because it misses this feature" and is correct, it doesn't matter if he is secretly paid by a competitor too. If anything, it helps us rest to evaluate things when two competitors actually pay people to tell us about the flaws in their competitors' products or why their products are better.
And I'm posting AC because I work in a web marketing company and will now head to do some guerrilla marketing on another, very popular website. That shouldn't invalidate my earlier points.
Oh, and yeah and, you are a bad person and a crappy slash dotter if you mod a person down, rather than just particularly poor postings.
It seems that perhaps the parent did get it afterall. Now, to the rest of the posters...
Re:eh (Score:2, Insightful)
Twitter has a long way to go to be the most infamous poster on slashdot. The worst and hence most infamous trolls on slashdot are the paid to post losers.
How do you know they are paid by the Uncle Sam/Israel/RIAA/CIA/FBI/Microsoft etc?
I often defend all of those organizations (and much worse ones) just for shits and giggles.
No one pays me a cent.
Re:eh (Score:4, Insightful)
The only problem I have with web based apps, and one of its major stumbling blocks, is it is useless without an internet connection. Lose your connection, lose your productivity. No amount of portability can make up for that simple fact.
Is your data *that* invaluable? Really?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Get real. Difference between you and "self respecting companies" is that they don't have a stash of porn they're trying hide.
"Self respecting companies" usually have a CFO whose job it is to make sure that money gets spent wisely. Let's consider having you or some other geek team manage my corporate data vs. doing it at Google:
Security:
Geek: encrypts stuff, holds me hostage
Google: Google datacenter security [google.com]
Risk:
Geek: let's face it, would sell his mother (never mind the customer database) to get laid
Google: Google approach to risk management [securecomputing.net.au]
Litigation & discovery:
Geek: will send lawyers whatever he's been asked to by his boss, and maybe a bit extra "by mistake"
Google: Will respond to specific and valid legal requests [google.com]
Service cost:
Geek: can never have enough (hardware, salary, perks, etc.) can't bother to come in wearing a clean t-shirt
Google: $50 a year [google.com]. Regardless of volume or usage. Upgraded continually.
I won't even mention the fact that you already trust a number of companies with your data - unless of course you've dug your own ditch and laid your own fibre between offices.
Google is staffed by asswipes like every other company. Unlike your employer, they just manage that risk.
Re:The thing is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
None of them are all that great. Do Google Apps do everything Office does? No, clearly not. But frankly, I think Office is overrated.
The point of Microsoft Office isn't that it's the greatest Office suite ever, it's that in a Microsoft setting, it's easy to integrate with a lot of other things so that everything ends up as Word documents or Excel sheets (or starts that way and ends up being something else).
As a standalone suite, pretty much anything will do the job unless you're always locked into Microsoft land (especially with huge Excel macros).
Re:eh (Score:3, Insightful)
Google has tried to get around this with Google Gears. When installed, it lets you use Google Docs offline. Sadly, it doesn't support all browsers (I know that it works in Firefox, not sure about IE or Opera, pretty sure that it doesn't work in Safari).
While not an ideal situation, it works. You do have a point, though, in that if you don't have an internet connection you are pretty screwed if you need to access your data that is only stored online.
Hopefully as Wi-Fi becomes more ubiquitous this will be less of an issue, but not much else can be done about it really.
Re:performance seems to have improved; who'll use (Score:3, Insightful)
This is way off-topic, but given the series of posts you've made, I think it needs to be said here.
Sometimes, a course of study at a school is designed by people who are actually smart, and they weave general knowledge of the field and awareness of the possibilities carefully throughout the various classes on more specific subjects. When you're taking such a course, almost by definition it is unlikely that you have yet gained the skill and experience to appreciate this.
Your attitude implies that you think you know better than your teachers, and that you insist on making your own judgements on the merits of what they teach. While both self-driven learning and healthy scepticism can be good things, you might like to stop occasionally and ask whether you are missing something that someone more experienced is trying to show you. From your posts here, it will be very clear to many of us who do work professionally that you have missed an opportunity to learn several useful things here: not only LaTeX, a widely used tool in its own right in some fields you might work in later, but also the experience that learning a new tool often doesn't take as long as you think, for example, and perhaps a few practical skills for preparing a good formal document. And you have given all this up just because instead of taking the enormous 5–10 minutes required to learn a new tool recommended by your teacher, you have stubbornly insisted on doing something your own way. If that is your mindset, you are pretty much doomed in any future career you might wish to pursue in the computing field.
You do not know everything. Suck it up, learn a bit of humility, and make the most of opportunities to learn about stuff, because you will probably never have the same kind of opportunity again and you will regret it if you don't. And please don't think I'm writing this just to patronise you. I used to be like you, and so probably did a lot of the other posters here, and I bet every one of us would take a different approach if we could do it again.