Google To Steal Office Web Apps' Thunder? 151
Barence writes "Google has stepped up its assault on Microsoft's productivity software with the acquisition of a start-up company that allows Office users to edit and share their documents on the Web. The search giant has acquired DocVerse for an undisclosed sum. Product manager Jonathan Rochelle said DocVerse software makes it easier for users and businesses to move their existing PC documents to the cloud, and that Google 'fell in love with what they were doing to make that transition easier.' Microsoft said in an emailed statement that Google's acquisition of DocVerse acknowledges that customers want to use and collaborate with Office documents. 'Furthermore, it reinforces that customers are embracing Microsoft's long-stated strategy of software plus services, which combines rich client software with cloud services.'"
Lock-In (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation (Score:3, Insightful)
"...it reinforces that customers are embracing Microsoft's long-stated strategy of software plus services, which combines rich client software with cloud services."
"...it reinforces that customers will be pushed into our long-stated strategy of software plus services, which combines bloated software and half baked DRM to nightmarish effect."
Let's see some of these "real web apps". (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on, bub. Show us some of these "real web apps". I sure as fuck haven't seen them. Every web app I've worked with has been shit.
Google's web apps are good compared to most other web apps, but pale in comparison to real desktop apps. Thunderbird is much nicer to use than GMail's web UI. Even Outlook is more functional, and Outlook is a piece of crap itself.
Re:Uh.huh (Score:4, Insightful)
The day web based applications overtake desktop applications is the day the web browser weighs in at over a gigabyte in size, accounting for all the API's and associated background services that will be required to deliver them.
This is just another attempt at offering 'software as a service', rental software which is something slashdotters moaned loudly about when Microsoft promoted the concept in the early 2000's. Now that Google is planning on it, it's being hailed as heroism.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:5, Insightful)
God have you seen google's idea of powerpoint?
No, but since I have to sit through hours of badly presented Microsoft Powerpoint presentations, nothing can be worse. If Google breaks powerpoint to the point where presenters have to present data using whiteboards, OHPs, movies, handouts, and good old fashioned oratory, then count me in.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the other way on. Developers hate web applications...
Both wrong. :)
Developers hate them and users hate them.
Unfortunately Marketing departments, bean counters like them. (Neither of these groups actually use them of course, but based on their paradigm shifting synergistic sizzle coolness 2.0 and low support costs per table 16-1 in Appendix PHBs couldn't possibly resist foisting them onto their users even if they wanted resist. (But why would they resist... overseeing the deployment of paradigm shifting synergistic coolness that would save the company money on paper is what PHB promotions are driven by. Its resume gold.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it depends on what you mean by "web apps". If you mean functional pages (online entry forms and that sort of thing), it's no worse than Java. But man, once you start taling AJAX/Web 2.0, it's fucking hell. While there's less work for browser-specific issues than there used to be (and providing you're not having to deal with legacy B.S., which a lot of in-house guys having to support IE6 apps do), it's still a bastard. Even with decent frameworks, complex web apps are significantly more complex than desktop equivalents; harder to design out of the box, harder to debug, with all sorts of issues, like latency and network issues, that desktop apps don't really have to deal with it. Making these apps appear as seamless as a desktop app is no mean feat.
Frankly, I think the browser is probably one of the worst application platforms ever developed. With any other GUI, there's reasonably close tie-in with the operating system. WEb apps are basically client-server apps based on browser kludges and a slippery-as-a-snake DOM and CSS APIs, which often look like GUI framework APIs redesigned by either the criminally insane or possibly severely mentally retarded.
I'm sure software makers/vendors love web apps for the reasons you state, but for the guy trying to code, debug and maintain this stuff, with the variety of web servers, operating systems and browsers, there is nothing but regret that Java, as ugly as it can get, never took off on the web. Because as ugly as Java can be, it's a paradise compared to some behemoth built out of CSS, PHP/Python/Java and Javascript backending some database on to some browser window.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say office 2007 is a pretty major improvement, At least for me only because excel can open way way more cells now.
There is a reason why there are these called databases. Stop using excel as a database. The old 65,000 row limit was too large. When spreadsheets get that large it is time to 'upgrade' to a database. Use database views (or what ever they are called in your database of choice) to sum up the data so that the smaller spreadsheet application can handle the data.
Re:Cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
How do I get Google Office to load in the less than .5 seconds it takes the various Office apps to start on my local system?
What Office apps are you using? I'm using Open Office and I just opened the spreadsheet app. it took exactly 11sec to open and present a blank spreadsheet.
On the other hand loading a 2-page long existing document in Google Docs just took 2 seconds (that's with a trans-national proxy through my company's gateway in the middle) in a browser that had not previously visited Google Docs (and thus had no cached JavaScript, etc.)
My experience with MS Office is that it's faster than OOo, but slower than Google Docs.
However, both MS Office and OOo speed up significantly once you've already loaded them once on most platforms. Why? Because they stay resident, taking up system resources. You can do the same thing in your browser with Google Docs. Just keep a tab open with Google Docs and all of your documents will come up faster.
The real bottom line isn't a matter of benchmarks, however, it's that the original poster's claim that Google Docs was "bloatware" ignores the fact that it's an implementation of a very large system which is at least as bloated in every fully-featured implementation.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:5, Insightful)
I really think you've started with a flawed premise.
I've actually found that users LOVE web apps if they do what they're intended to do AND the company is willing to move beyond the IE6 sphere of stupidity.
I was working for a media company and they deployed a web app that made it easier for journos to submit stories, the only desktop app required was used by the editors. No longer did they have to log in to a VPN and run a very network intensive publishing app via satellite from remote places just to submit the story. They could submit stories written in say notepad and copied & pasted into this app. The same company uses many other web apps that users like. The only time there's a complaint is when the developers screw up and break the app. This happens with ALL apps (same publishing app mentioned before broke almost weekly and it is not a web app).
There's many other web apps (including Google Documents) that are giving users a fresh look on web apps. While I can understand people's hesitations, I remember the good old days of crummy web apps crashing your computer and chewing processor time like there's no tomorrow, I do feel that we'll see a fundamental shift from local to cloud apps in the near future by choice. My father at 67 has moved entirely to OpenOffice with Google Docs sync as he writes a lot on the road. For me, this is a sign of just how little hold Microsoft really has on the end user market.
It seems the ONLY people I see complaining these days are people who work in IT. I'm not sure if these people have just not spoken to their users in 10 years, the web apps they deploy are crap, or that they fear their own expendability in the coming years.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:3, Insightful)
Like it or not, web apps -- even the most powerful of them -- still suffer from one basic sticking point: They're limited by the browser.
Here's the perfect example: Name one webmail client where you can copy a picture from anywhere (browser, word, powerpoint) and paste it into an email. You can't, because web browsers lack (for security) the ability to interact with your clipboard.
Web apps suffer from another problem: Browsers use a "page based" paradigm. You know, because most of the web is about navigating between pages. Try as hard as you might, you can't get rid of those "Back" and "Forward" buttons above your application. In almost all web apps, a click of one of these buttons is disastrous. Sure, you can hack around it with frequent autosaves, but your poor user will still lose data.
Re:Cloud (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear hear! That's basically the upshot yes. You're foisting your personal documents onto a public server, you're allowing a company to index it and show you ads based on the resulting content you save/create, and people do it because they know only that they dislike Microsoft and don't want to pay money for goods and services.
It'll be interesting to see the advertising bubble burst when everyone realises those little sidebar ads don't generate nearly enough revenue in the real world.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you aren't implementing AJAX properly. You can tell when a request is launched, when its started its return, and when the information you've requested is successfully back. Albeit, this is not an easy thing to learn - but once you've got it down it makes Web Apps a whole lot easier.
When you've got a network issue - it's going to affect your Desktop App or your web app. Latency is latency - the only difference is a desktop app will wait for the network, a web app you have to tell it to wait (or you can tell it to do something else, if there is other stuff to do).
I find Web Apps easier to debug, because its running off of a single server, not the client. So "duplicating" the error is as easy as repeating the steps the user did. I do not have to make sure my environment is configured exactly like theirs.
Perhaps your dissatisfaction falls into the way things are implemented in your work environment. I get the feeling YOU didn't choose the "CSS, PHP/Python/Java and Javascript backending some database " but someone else did, and now you're stuck maintaining (meaning cleaning up) their mess.
I have never had a real issue using AJAX with an ASP.NET front end, C# or VB back end, handling an Oracle/MySQL Database. Everything within that architecture is designed with the others in mind - and it makes programming a dream.
And if your company is willing to dish out the cash for some AJAX user controls - like Telerik or something, you don't even have to deal with AJAX all that much, and most of your code is written for you.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:4, Insightful)
Good orators can present regardless of the medium. Folks that are bad with PPT are more than likely bad at other forms of presenting too, so don't think crippling Powerpoint and forcing a throwback will change anything.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:3, Insightful)
... you don't have to worry about different versions, updating is a snap...
Only problem here, and it's worth mentioning: it also means that you can't just stick with a stable version.
No, no, not "stable" like "doesn't crash". "Stable" like "doesn't change". There are users out there happily using Office 2000 and it hasn't changed because it is installed locally on their computers. There isn't going to be anyone happily using a 3-year-old version of Google Docs, since it's seamlessly automatically upgraded behind the scenes. Wake up one day, and things are different.
Not that it's the end of the world. I just think it's good to recognize that many times perfectly good features like "automatically and seamlessly updates itself to always have the newest version" have a flip side that might possibly annoy the crap out of someone.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of thinking is the same as what inspired the Newsweek article from 1995 which was discussed earlier today. That article predicted that the internet would never catch on because it was hard to use in its current form. You have to remember that the platform is going to continue to improve and be refined.
Already, the Google apps are easy to use for basic tasks. They load quickly, and while they may lack certain features and polish that can be found in the latest version of Office, they are quite usable. They're only going to get better, and browsers and PCs are only going to keep improving. There isn't much that can be added to Office for 95% of users, so the gap will close.
The biggest advantage to web apps is file management. I don't have to consider where my files are stored, or which computers have access to them. I don't have to worry that I have two different versions if I worked on a file remotely. I don't have to worry about what happens if my hard drive crashes. Users hate worrying about those things.
Re:Translation (Score:2, Insightful)
What DRM? Seriously.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:3, Insightful)
And you have obviously never dealt with large spreadsheets that are unsuitable for a database or data for which it would not make any sense to make a database.
At least people like you don't get to make important decisions like keeping an idiotic low fixed row/column limit.
Re:Let's see some of these "real web apps". (Score:4, Insightful)
It's possible that you're just more comfortable with what you already know well. These things are all easily accomplished in gmail.
Next to the "search mail" button on the top of the screen is the "show search options" link. There you will find fields for searching by sender and attachments. Just click the "has attachment" button and hit search: attachments. I *just* tried a partial search --also for a part of a phone number-- and got precise results, including every message with the entire phone number. No idea why your partial string search failed.
I find this approach both easier and more precise than the slow, apparently unindexed and certainly not boolean search toolbar in Outlook.
Re:Cloud (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, no I don't. The browser is the operating system. So unless you want to count how long it takes to boot windows...
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:4, Insightful)
No longer did they have to log in to a VPN and run a very network intensive publishing app via satellite from remote places just to submit the story.
Wait. The desktop app was more network intensive than the web app? Were they using X forwarding or something? And the web app somehow doesn't require the VPN? This doesn't make sense.
Re:market proof. (Score:4, Insightful)
google doesn't force you to join or limit your options if you don't.
Re:Normal people hate web apps. (Score:3, Insightful)