Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week 264
Posted
by
timothy
from the file-formats-matter dept.
from the file-formats-matter dept.
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.
Is it safe? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:1, Interesting)
Even on linux?
Business model (Score:3, Interesting)
I see MS doing several things with this, including:
The free version builds understanding and credibility; especially if it integrates with teh desktop version. Once taht is done, migrate to paid for versions for businesses since the model is now accepted.
Working to a client server model (despite the "cloud" what's old is new again) and partner / acquire a company in that space to offer businesses a full suite of services.
If OfficeLive catches on, advertising will follow.
Ultimately, I think it's about building a tight eco-system around office / entertainment / information that allows them to capture eyeballs for ads and combat piracy so content providers sign on. This is but one more shot in that battle.
Don't forget GUID. (Score:4, Interesting)
Who cares if it's free, if you don't want it anyway?
This has nothing to do with OOXML. (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has no interest in OOXML. From Microsoft's perspective, it's deprecated. That's why they let it go. This is about XAML, upon which Silverlight is built. And XAML could be a very powerful thing.
A subset of XAML, XPS replaces Postscript. Any static page that can be printed can be stored as XPS. XPS is/will be the printer control language in Windows.
But XPS can also be displayed on screen (good bye Acrobat). XPS could be used to store any static document (goodbye Illustrator).
But the superset XAML is dynamic framework for rich internet apps (goodbye Flash).
XAML pages/apps can be designed in an Illustrator-like ExpressionWeb (goodbye HTML5 and CSS).
Of course, you can use the Office Web Apps without Silverlight and you can still see PNG images of your document. But if you should decide to install Silverlight I bet you'll find it a better experience.
Re:Change in business model ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue.
And at what point will there be a free windows version ?
YES, Microsoft is changing their business model big time. Steve Ballmer announced in his recent University of Washington speech [microsoft.com] that Microsoft is dedicating 70% fo their software engineers to creating cloud-based versions of their local software, and by next year it will increase to 90%. They were slow to adopt the cloud but plan to become a big contender in a short amount of time.
The speech is about 90 minutes long and is very interesting, for those who care to watch. He's quite a good speaker with a very good knowledge of the industry, and he handles people's questions directly and in detail. What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.
probably not (Score:5, Interesting)
Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard,
I doubt that's the case at all. When you're going against other software such as Google Documents, you either have to offer a better product, tight lock-in, or better pricing. Free is hard to beat, you've committed (on paper anyway) to open standards which greatly hobbles your lock-in, and so you're left having to offer at least a good chunk of the features the competition is giving that you currently are not.
Right now, Google Documents is offering a powerful new online service. I use Google Spreadsheet daily. It ain't perfect, but considering how new it is, it works amazingly well. It's easy to forget you're using a web browser when you just hit certain key combos for example out of habit, and to your surprise, they work perfect. Some of my spreadsheets can't be used with it, but the ability to collaborate online with others maintaining the same spreadsheets, at the exact same time, no emailing files back and forth all day or fighting over update locks on the LAN (or possible file corruption / data loss from an update war) it provides a unique, powerful, useful feature that my current use can't live without, and that MS Office doesn't offer. And my needs are far from unique. Everyone I tell about this is amazed and wants to try it because it gives them a useful option that MS Office just can't deliver.
This is it for Office, this is their shot to either keep or lose a market. It's not surprising in the least that they're rushing to get something available asap for online collaboration.
And if it were anybody but google, you can bet your last dollar that MS would have a whole herd of lawyers at someone's door with fistfuls of litigation trying to put a stop to it or at least stall it a year or two to give them a chance to catch up.
IMHO Google Documents is one of THE best things to come out of Google Labs. In the end, who knows, maybe MS will be offering a superior product. But there's simply no way this could happen without the necessary motivation.
Re:second post (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, now women can also enjoy being anally penetrated doncha know.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, that was exactly the intent when MS created its own proprietary document formats. There was a time when WordPerfect was happy to convert to and from Ami Pro, when Star Writer exported just fine to Word. Microsoft changed all that by relentlessly leveraging compatibility to feed their revenue stream.
Agreed. That's why I mentioned both Adobe and Word formats in the same sentence. I don't think either one is particularly appropriate (although PDF as a published specification is a great deal easier to work with when doing document conversion).
That's hard to believe, and not entirely relevant. What I'm talking about -as a minimal scenario- is a situation where the original software just doesn't exist any more. Twenty-five years ago in 1985, Word was something called Multi-Tool. I sincerely doubt one of its files would open in Office 2010 without significant effort from a developer.
Nobody. That's exactly what we do. The problem is that we work with legal documents from over 20 countries and hundreds of different sources. We have a limited amount of development resources (mostly just me) and we need these documents to be available forever, effectively. If people could actually settle on a standard that really was a standard, if people could actually agree to look slightly farther down the track than their own desktops, we could actually spend time building new searching capabilities, ontologies and frameworks to make the data way, way more useful than it is today.
Instead, I spend all my time dealing with half-assed, unstructured formatting brought about by the fact that people are content to use a second-rate implementation of a deliberately obfuscated format.
Other vendors may be guilty of this, too. But Microsoft has done it longer and more effectively than most.
Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read the thread you linked to you would have found plausible solutions on the 1st page.
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:1, Interesting)
Incorrect. It's a browser plugin so the JavaScript doesn't matter and it uses Microsoft's SilverLight / Novell's Moonlight which is .NET to draw Microsoft Office.
Microsoft haven't embraced HTML5, they're still pushing SilverLight.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:2, Interesting)
As to your wordstar files, if they're in a binary format, it's understandable.. for MS docx, or odf etc, it's a zip file with xml...
Now I might be wrong, it's been several decades since I had to work with WordStar files, but weren't they just basically text marked up with control chars? Probably even less of a challenge to write a tool to read them than it would be to xslt docx into a preferred format.
Re:OO 3.2 kicks ass! (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you just accidentally hit the nail on the head on why Open Office sucks for business. Don't get me wrong, it is just fine for little Sally homemaker or Billy who needs to make a doc to print for school (just don't give it to the teacher in OO.o Doc format, as I found it'll be turned into Word salad by MS Word) but it is an Office Suite not just a single app. I have been messing with OO.o and giving it out on my freeware disc to customers since 1.5, but I've found here is pretty much what to expect with OO.o "Here is the latest OO.o! Writer is 50 times better! It has more cool stuff, and the next version will be leaps and bounds better than that! And ..oh...here is some other shit, use it or not. whatever"
Now I personally don't have a clue why that is, maybe someone from OO.o is here and can explain, but it seems to me that OO.o treats anything in the suite that isn't writer like red headed stepchildren. I would say writer is getting close to 2K3 in usability, and maybe in some areas even better, but the rest? Hell the ancient Office 2K I use is better than that crap. I don't know why they waste all their resources on writer, as with the except of MS Office/Open Office compatibility I would say it passed "Good enough" at 2.xx and at 3 was better than good enough. But with their Excel and PPT apps being so shitty I just can't recommend it to businesses, it just isn't anywhere close. Anybody here know why all the love goes to writer?
what's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
This is not true (Score:4, Interesting)
Firstly, if docx files were plain text markup (PP asserts that is "exactly" what they are), then any word processing package would be able to reproduce, exactly, the documents as they appear in MS-Word. Other applications are not able to do this, and the reason is because the file format is NOT plain text markup.
Secondly, nice distraction with HTML. Since when is the web supposed to be an archival medium?
GP was on-topic. The specification for OOXML includes references to previous .doc file formats, hence discussion of those is relevant in any discussion of OOXML.
I'd say your post is one-eyed to the point of propaganda -- were you paid to write it?