Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week 264
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft will offer an online version of Office 2010 for free. I have to wonder, will this remain free indefinitely? Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard, then go back to business as usual?" Probably a harder sell after Google's acquisition of DocVerse.
OO 3.2 kicks ass! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother? I swear to god, I can do anything I want in sun (oracle? no hate here.) oo32 that I used to do in o2k3
Have you seen the OO32 release? My God! hahaha
I already collect text editors, but gosh darn I just can's see paying thousands anymore? Maybe you got a translator or some proprietary nonsense? I think we all would be wise to audit and revise what we really need.
Hey if you need Microsoft Office, more power to ya, the only thing I need now is a way to export their proprietary format to a real format which can be used in oo32 ;)
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget kids! (Score:1, Insightful)
That first sample of crack is free too!
Re:Free is a good price (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, you should try the new OS release: http://www.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com]
Free to use, easy to install, no viruses, software store like iTunes but for your desktop!
Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management? (Score:3, Insightful)
At which point they simply purchase a copy of Microsoft Office instead for most use, just as Microsoft hopes they'll do. I don't imagine any business will want their office software tied to internet connectivity. And many won't want their documents in the cloud out of their control. So Microsoft Office EXEs will still be profitable while the online Office offers essentially what most companies already have in the form of Outlook Web Edition.
If the documents though are stored on your Microsoft(tm) Sharepoint(tm) server running on Microsoft(tm) Windows 2008 Server(tm) then you can use Sharepoint(tm) to host your documents off of Microsoft(tm)'s server while still using this free interface while on a mobile device.
Personally I find Google Docs only marginally useful even for the simplest of tasks, it would never replace a copy of Office for me. But it has some really useful features and is great for collaboration. Collaboration requires everyone to have free access though. I can't put up a document and require a client to purchase XYZ software to be able to make edits.
I don't see this cutting into Microsoft's sales too badly.
Re:Business model (Score:5, Insightful)
My take on it: they decided to do it because Google's doing it, and they don't want to get "left behind". Then they came up with a plausible-sounding business case for their scheme.
Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I find any "office suite" useless for the simplest of tasks. Why do people think their to-do list or 1-page memo requires anything more complicated than plain text?
Re:Free is a good price (Score:2, Insightful)
I can afford it. No return hassles. No sales tax. No need for a warranty. No elevated expectations. Can they do this with Windows?
Did that years ago, at piratebay.
clear strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary suggests this is a push to cement the OOXML standard and ultimately lock-in for MS Office. I don't really see why they need a free cloud-based offering to do that, MS Office has done extremely well at locking-in their standards in the past. TFA that it refers to also clearly argues this is MS having to compete with Google Docs, a much more evident profit motive. MS is also quoted that they see this as an opportunity to get at least a little income from people who, for various reasons, aren't currently paying for MS Office.
Whether it remains free indefinitely depends on how it works out, i.e. whether they think it is making more money (directly and indirectly) than doing something else. Stating the obvious but it's a silly question. Even Openoffice is freely supported by Sun for a profit motive: breaking the MS standards lock-in.
The Google quotes are on the money though. It's standard practice now for businesses to install Office on every machine while all the documents are saved to a network drive. This is a bit of a kludge really, people hunting through directories trying to find files is very cumbersome, especially since lots of people insist on saving works-in-progress to their desktop and only copying over when they're finished - and very often forgetting or not getting around to it.
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who has been on record defending Microsoft from some of Slashdot Microsoft can do no good crowd...
I think it is more to the point you need to install a platform specific program to your computer. Which really misses the point of having a web based version of your tool. The point of having a web based program is to not have any bit run on your computer... Why?
1. Security. Although a lot of fuss and whining about security of a cloud etc... But if it access data on your drive it can effect overall security. So you have a virus infected excel file, that you open up and share with other systems then download it again... Guess what that gets infected too. Secondly ok you have an EXE it is only matter of time the data that EXE does is found out. It seems like a way to try to work around some bad security practices.
2. Updates. A lot of IT for companies are not keen on keeping your systems up to date. They should but they don't however to compensate that they try to lock your computer down so if you try to install this EXE it will fail, sure you may be able to get the EXE once... But if they update their code and you cannot get the EXE then you are stuck.
3.Platform indépendance. Yes I know Microsoft is using this to push windows... But really... Use silverlight or some other Microsoft plugin that even pretends that it is more platform independent then an EXE.
4. Mixing the worst of both worlds... So you are going to have a clumsy browser to do the UI with an EXE to do some communication... Seems kinda backwards to me.
Microsoft for Web Application has been on the record of being really bad... I have tried threw out the decade (with my last attempt a couple of months ago) to see Microsoft web based applications and they all seem to be a decade behind the time. Heck I do a lot of Web Based Development with .NET however I rarely if ever use any of the additional tool boxes that come with it... Because they are so crappy that I have to make them myself to get any real quality of out my product.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, you must be really, really new here.
This is exactly the problem (and the same facile response) we've been coping with since the mid-90s, and I can tell you from experience that things are never as simple as you describe.
Let's take one client I'm working with right now. They're a national institution, responsible for archiving court documents in perpetuity. That means, effectively, forever. Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup (e.g. XML) following an open, formal and workable specification whose definitions are slightly more robust than "Do this formatting the way we did in Word 97" and which consists of slightly more than dumping blobs of binary data inside tags, we might stand a chance. It would still be a bit of an ask, but in the worst case scenario, we could probably infer (or ignore) the parts that puzzled us most.
Document formats matter because a great many of them -especially those produced by the public sector- have historical value and need to be preserved for a very long time.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:2, Insightful)
This may be true whether it is a file in Word format, PDF or an even more proprietary format from Apple. So it is not something unique to MS.
And as to your 25 year time frame, I can still read the oldest document produced by Word on the latetst MS Office. And lastly, who's stopping you from storing files in XML format in Office?
Re:Is it safe? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's true though. Once your docs are in MS format, your ass does belong to them. And let's not talk about macros. Other formats having the problem is true, but kinda irrelevant. PDF at least is well documented, and , IIRC, open.
I can't read my WordStar CP/M docs that easily anymore. Do you think MS will be eternal-ier than WordStar ? Do you trust MS to eternally produce good software at reasonably prices ? Or others to risk lawsuits and such for trying to import it ? And older versions of Word do have at least formatting issues with later versions. MS are doing their darnedest to leverage the document pool into more software sales, do you expect that to change ?
XML per se is not really good for simple docs, there's too many way to do things. MS's OOXML neither, it's too vague and immaterial.
Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management? (Score:3, Insightful)
I usually have OOo open, and opening another app for simpler documents seems kinda silly. Plus I like the creature comforts (files history, automatic bullet lists...)
Re:probably not (Score:1, Insightful)
Fortunately for the world, MS just don't know how to create a superior product. They rely on lock-in, monopoly tactics, bribery and end-user naivety. All of which work for a while, but not in the very long term.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
That complaint about .DOC is very correct. Just a couple weeks ago someone at the company I worked for received a Word 2.0 document and was asking for my help opening it as he only had Word 2010.
Those formats are very temporary in their usability.
To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.
PDF was made in 1993 by Adobe, which was only 17 years ago yes. But PDF is just a bunch of additions to PostScript ( or .ps files) which has been a widely used format since 1982, which was 28 years ago.
As long as one avoids the worst of the PDF specific features like DRM and scripting, the bulk of the content and markup will be readable.
This is one format that will probably remain around next to forever, just like ASCII.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you looked at the OOXML standard? Have you ever opened up Word 2007, saved a document, renamed it to .zip, and had a look at its contents? I would hope you have considering the inference that you work in document management.
"If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup..." - that's exactly what OOXML format is.
May I suggest, particularly for the .DOC files, you could recommend to your client to start building a process to convert them to .DOCX files using perhaps the Word 2007 user interface, or maybe the APIs. That way the majority of content is plaintext readable, and the markup can be made sense of except for most extreme layout nuances.
And tell me, while you're at it - what do you need to do to get Word 2007 or 2010 to store all of a document's content as binary blobs? Are you referring to image data? Image data which can be stored in a .docx file in its original format i.e. PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP etc etc?
While we're at it, lets look at an alternative. HTML, I'm sure you'll agree, is a plain text markup (XML-like) standard which is open, and as formal and workable a specification as there can be. Do you think, in 25 years time, there will be a web browser that will be able to render a page from today's web in perfect form. Hell, can you show me a web browser TODAY that renders the most complicated web page markup perfectly? It all depends on how complicated the layout of the document is, and how complex the markup is.
In 25 years time, assuming there's a ZIP library of some description around, I will be able to open my OOXML .docx files and happilly read the content inside. I'll be able to develop something that could come pretty close to rendering those documents except for a few edge case layouts.
You need to get on-topic, this is a discussion on OOXML, not the previous .DOC file formats.
Re:Don't forget kids! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is completely not true. Have you actually ever tried to get the first sample for free? It doesn't work.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least for Office '03 and '07, there's a Registry hack to enable old "insecure" Office formats, which IIRC were disabled for '03 SP3.
I believe Microsoft has .REG files you can download to make this easier.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:2, Insightful)
What platforms do these readers work on?
Re:Is it safe? (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:S.O.B. (Score:3, Insightful)
WordPerfect was effectively dead long before Office 97 came along.
Its a trap. (Score:2, Insightful)
Naw ... this one is like crack. Getting you hooked is "free" but once your documents are in its clutches, um, I mean file format, then your ass belongs to them.
Yup, I believe the same. I wonder what happened to /. "itsatrap" tag, I I kinda liked it as it separated in a clear way stories from Microsoft.
Re:what's the point? (Score:1, Insightful)
Everything you describe already exists. What possible reason would people have to throw it all out and move to Microsoft't proprietary (and probably patented) standard?
It's objectively better?
OOXML is far from transparent (Score:2, Insightful)
OOXML (not to say that I'm claiming that .docx is exactly OOXML, it isn't) can contain proprietary binary blobs [grokdoc.net]. Or has Microsoft gotten around to providing a "make sure that this document will be easy to transfer to other formats" button/preference. No? How surprising....
> Now how hard it is to do this, really depends.
Duh. So prove to us that it's easy and release, in the near future, an open-source renderer for .docx which is 100% compatible with the behavior of any given version of MS Office (my guess is that they don't all render it exactly the same, themselves).