Google To Add Presentations 184
A number of readers (some from the audience at Web 2.0 Expo) wrote to let us know that Google is adding presentations to their Docs and Spreadsheets package. With the announcement the company revealed that they have purchased Tonic Systems to help with the new presentation software. It's expected to be ready by summer. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was asked if Docs and Spreadsheets will compete with MS Office, and he said, "We don't think so. It doesn't have all the functionality, nor is it intended to have the functionality of products like Microsoft Office."
Won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Won't work (Score:5, Interesting)
The more appropriate response will be for Office to be looked upon in the same way that a compiler is, something that just a few people, specialists, need to have a copy of, while everyone else can make use of much simpler web-based alternatives.
As people start to use "Google Office" at home for its ease of sharing documents, etc, the same argument that made Office a standard will start to apply to Google Apps: "Hey, all these people right out of school already know Google Apps, let's just standardized on that so we don't have to teach them Office".
I don't think I've run MS Office in three years, and my use of Open Office is starting to fall off quite a bit as I just load things people send me into Google Docs from the get-go. I'm also noticing that the only thing I'm storing on my PCs are music files and photos, with more and more photos being stored online as well. This is great!
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You can compile code online, and most people really don't need to do otherwise?
*feels disconnected from the modern world*
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Second, those Google Apps are suitable for some purposes, but for heavy or advanced usage, they're totally unfit. So far we're looking at a bunch of online toys trying to pretend they're Office. They will replace Office exactly as the "web OS" sites will replace Windows.
Third, if a company is desperate to save from lic
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1) for the larger companies this is correct. in f
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You're making some huge mistakes. First, the cost of office software is nothing for a corporation, compared to its other expenses (taxes, salaries, hardware, office bills and so on and so on).
I disagree. The cost of software for a company includes the cost of licensing, license management, maintenance, file transfer, the potential cost of license noncompliance, and support. Google docs mitigates more than just the flat license cost. These savings may not be considered significant and inefficient bureaucracies in large, american companies will probably resist the change for a long time, but that is not the same thing as the cost itself being nothing.
Now consider smaller companies that don't ha
bullshit (Score:2)
$200 saved per employee is $200 saved. Big corporations are as sensitive to that as little corporations.
Second, those Google Apps are suitable for some purposes, but for heavy or advanced usage, they're totally unfit.
Neither is Microsoft Office; Microsoft Office is merely bloated and slow. Most people don't know what
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Missing some features? Check if there are open source plugins or maybe some closed source ones that you can buy for micropayments.
Easier said... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know if you've actually USED Docs but the last time I did--about 2-3 weeks ago--it didn't even have find & replace capability. All it had was "replace all" and even that had "experimental" warnings all over it and couldn't be undone.
So saying "All they need is a good API and a mechanism for plugins" when they can't even do find & replace is just a little silly, in my opinion.
Maybe. In about 2 years. At the earliest.
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What?
? Time to take a class..... (Score:2)
1. You put quotes around something that certainly wasn't a quote. You do realize they're called "quotation marks" for a reason, right?
2. I didn't say plugins are a bad idea
3. I didn't say that they CAN'T implement find & replace
So basically, you misunderstood, it seems, each and every sentence I wrote.
Are you always this dense or do you save it all for us on slashdot?
Re:Won't work (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know. I run emacs just for the games.
Quick! (Score:2, Funny)
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So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to start offering a product or service, and it's going to cost you more to develop that product/service than to buy a company which already offers it, the choice is obvious.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise it's a sound business move.
Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
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Buying them to remove a competitor is a sound business move.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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and it kills me, they are doing the same thing, yet Microsft[sic] is "Evil" and when Google does the same thing they are shitting Sunshine?
You know both Charlie Manson and Charlie Chaplin inhaled air, but one is called "evil" and the other is considered a great actor.
oh the hipocracy[sic] that we call Slashdot...
Maybe you need to learn what hypocrisy is or maybe you need to learn to understand what it is that MS does that many consider wrong or detrimental and how what Google does differs from them. MS buys companies to kill the technology and make sure it does not undermine their monopoly. Google has no monopoly and when they buy a company they do so to bring that technology to mark
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Are these softwares really usable ? (Score:2)
I never used seriously one of those fancy AJAX softare for more than 10 minues (except Google Maps) and my feeling was that even on a decent PC they are sluggishly slow, and lacking a lot of features. Now I read in many places that Google is a real contender for the office applications and I do not understand how that can be possible beside the mail.
It reminds me 1997 when we were supposed to have Corel Office in java: There was such a discrepancy between what I could read in the news and the true experie
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Buying companies isn't just a Microsoft thing. Why do you think many dot-com boomers have this startup dream that they want to start a company only to be later bought by bigger companies and become instantly rich?
What Microsoft practices this differently is that they often buy competitors and then dismantle it with no intention of acquisition of technology or talent, just so it no longer competes.
Lazy employees (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly do Google employees do all day? Count money, play pool, and ride Segways?
Furthermore, if this cannot export to PDF or PowerPoint, it's pretty much useless. When giving presentations, Internet access is rarely provided or is flakey at best.
Export (Score:2)
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At least I don't have to convert to MS'
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-matthew
Re:Lazy employees (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Lazy employees (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem isn't in animation, but in poor utility. People say they hate absolutely every site that uses Flash, "Flash garbage!" and then go to watch the latest videos on YouTube.
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Still could be done better in applets anyway.
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Still could be done better in applets anyway.
Yea, it's much better apparently to decode with a bytecode decoder written in Java (a 20MB runtime) vs a light binary decoder in Flash (1 MB runtime).
You should jump and do your own YouTube right now.
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Why handicap one's self with flash?
Oh, and:
$ ls -lh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6.8M 2007-01-19 14:2
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Excuse me but why exactly do we take as a reference what do stupid people consider for "normal"?
Oh, and:
$ ls -lh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6.8M 2007-01-19 14:21
Not sure where you are getting the 1M runtime from.
You're really go
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Sadly, and disturbingly, PDF files can do animations [uoregon.edu].
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I use animations in pdfs (made from LaTeX) for all my presentations [umd.edu]. pdfanim [uni-bremen.de] is pretty damned reliable. Sadly the results don't quite work with xpdf at the moment, but Acrobat or Acrobat Reader have been available for every talk I've given.
Re:Lazy employees (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look at the introductory presentation [meyerweb.com] - it's pretty neat especially considering it's all standard html+css+js.
S5 is very handy (Score:2, Interesting)
I have used S5 for my presentations for a while now, and mainly for two reasons:
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Where does the information that it can't export to PDF or PowerPoint format come from? I can't find that in TFA. Google Documents and Spreadsheets can certainly export to MS Office, OpenDocument, PDF and other formats, so it would certainly surprise me if this couldn't too.
Presentation software is different (Score:2)
I do training frequently and use powerpoint as one of my tools. The laptop that I use most often doesn't
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Wait until the next big thing in the office market comes along, and soon we'll all be talking about how we can't live without the feature(s).
You miss my point. I'm sure there are hitherto undiscovered features in a wordprocessor that will make life easier for us. I'm just saying it's not a glamorous field of innovation. Sorta like the difference (in physics) between working on high temperature superconductivity versus inventing new plastics.
Also, there is a hidden assumption with people today that every field necessarily always has something new to discover. That is just wishful thinking. Fields do die out in terms of innovation and are supe
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When giving presentations, Internet access is rarely provided or is flakey at best.
I disagree. Anyone who comes to my company to present gets internet access. And practically every time my people have gone somewhere else they're provided internet access. And if there is a computer in the presentation center already it most likely will have internet access.
That doesn't mean that this product doesn't need export capabilities, I'm just arguing against your internet comment (:
Re:Lazy employees (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, and if it doesn't let you type the letter "e", that will be bad too. Also, it shouldn't give you cancer - I think it would be bad if it gave you cancer.
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Exactly what Microsoft has been planning for them to do for all these years. The people who write presentation code are working around bugs in IE; the people who write backend stuff are working around bugs in Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.; and the people who do apps are working around bugs in XP/Vista.
Microsoft doesn't introduce bugs because they're sloppy, it's a business strategy to keep there competitors occupied while they "innovate."
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http://www.tonicsystems.com/ [tonicsystems.com] won't give you much but the web archive does:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060820002948/http://
PDF seems one of the things they do.
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is only their way of saying MSOffice is no longer relevant, that's all.
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Because none of them is ready to compete with Office yet. We've seen our share of "Linux takes over Windows this year!" claims, and they've all been forgotten, and lately even laughed at.
It doesn't mean they aren't gearing up to compete with Office.
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Nobody in his right mind are going to take on MS in the office apps market. They own the file formats. They own the APIs. If you watch what MS does and try to outmaneuver them, you will lose because they have much more favorable moves open to them than you.
On the other hand, you can find and exploit a niche MS is weak in. Instead of playing three games of simultaneous chess with them, you play one. In the short term, you can win in a limited way. In the long time, your goa
Re:Competing with MSFT (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF!? Computers haven't lagged behind keystrokes in like 15 years (although browser based apps chock full of Javascript aim to change that). What are you running, a Mac Classic or something?
-matthew
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I used to turn off changes' tracking so Word would not be so slow on my larger documents.
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You, my friend, are in need of AbiWord [abisource.com].
I only have experience with it on Gentoo Linux, so I have no idea how it performs on other operating systems. However, the experience I have had with it has been quite pleasant. Es
Tonic makes a good product. (Score:5, Informative)
So at least now I believe Google Presently will be a decent product.
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-metric
An Access solution would be needed too... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or they could use their own backend... (Score:2)
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But, everyone here says otherwise! (Score:2)
Targeted ads! (Score:5, Funny)
Google declares war on learning (Score:2)
Evidently, Google doesn't read our beloved
Google Office Ajax13 (Score:4, Interesting)
the many (IMHO far better) online office suites. I have a hard time looking at Google Docs
and thinking anyone would find it compares to say "Ajax13" ( http://www.ajax13.com/ [ajax13.com] ) or other
independent offerings.
Likewise, Google's webtop pales in comparison to far slicker applications like DesktopTwo
( http://www.desktoptwo.com/ [desktoptwo.com] ). -- which by the way uses a web based java version of OpenOffice
which is also slicker than any of Google's office apps.
I'm all for "free" and "freely distributed" web applications replacing the MS Office tax that
we're all forced to pay, but I'm also for the best man winning. And IMHO, Google's not exactly
deserving of the top spot here.
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Hmmm.... Confidentiality? (Score:2)
Why should I care about this (Score:2)
Hat trick!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Things are hard enough as it is, but good grief!
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Awesome, now I need my laptop to work, the projector to be in a good mood, _AND_ an internet connection... in a place i've probably never been until the presentation.
Not really. I'm sure like the other Google doc tools, nothing will prevent you from downloading a local copy in common and open standards. The difference in my opinion is that now when creating the presentation, it is easier to collaborate on it and instead of uploading it to the Web after the presentation, you just make it public/add access for people. Also, when you go into the meeting where you are presenting, and those four people logging in via teleconferencing can't see the presentation for some rea
Now that Google has a PowerPoint type app (Score:2)
I remember years ago when Scott McNealy mocked MS about needing a word processor, forbid the use of PowerPoint at Sun and made a big show of handing out whiteboards and markers to his employees
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translation (Score:2)
That's a nice way of saying "oh, no, we wouldn't want it to be that bloated and complicated"
I'm converted! (Score:2, Informative)
I want to keep my docs forever
I moved everything over simply because my docs are spread across multiple machines some of which are ancient. I suddenly found myself wanting an ancient document that was stored on a laptop that didn't have any Internet connection. Luckily it still worked but it was a game getting the docs to a more modern PC. With Google docs I won't care what media the docs stored on, nor
Summer (Score:2)
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Re:Do you want it to replace MS Office? (Score:4, Interesting)
Got it in one. Add this to the commercial domain packaging Google is offering and it looks like the platform for a lot of small businesses. $50/user/year and you can throw away all your departmental Microsoft servers. If you get controlled logins, Gmail, Writely, spreadsheet and presentation as well as a portal with your own domain name, why bother with Microsoft? Oh and you can throw away all the operations support structure and those dusty MCSE's as well. That's gotta save you more than $50/user/year, and you get a reliable platform too. I mean, it isn't like Google doesn't have a bit of redundancy here & there.
I'm an old and dusty MCSE/network engineer too and I don't see why a small business needs that kind of infrastructure or expertise any more than you should have a television engineer in your home to switch channels for you.
I was once a Microsoft shill until I discovered my inner Fear of Flying Chairs...
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-- Albert Einstein (Yahoo Serious).
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Because Writely isn't even half as good as having a real word processor, MS Word, Open Office Writer or otherwise. It's buggy, I've experienced a bug with hitting enter and getting two blank lines every time that hadn't been fixed the last time I tried it. I really wanted online office to be worthy of usage because it is practical and nice, but Google's apps
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Because there's TONS of prior art there. I would hardly call that 'patent infringement', as any patent so issued is obviously defective.
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I have been hoping, paying...no not praying.....hoping that Google would pickup money management and even accounting, why not tax forms and the like. I have switched over to Google completely. I abandened my spam infested Outlook, no longer use my legal copy of Word and excell and no matter where I go, I always have my entire office with me (If there is Internet that is)
Lol, Don't keep the contact details of your ISP in your GMail address list because you can't call em when ther
Add Quickbooks to that list (Score:2)
A good Quickbooks replacement that wasn't even free but ran on Linux, would go a long way toward us being able to ditch Windows.
Transporter_ii
Re:Is it Flash or lots of JavaScript? (Score:4, Informative)
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JarJar actually works well (Score:2)
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Unless they plan to port it to Flash, buying this company and its product was a pretty dumb decision. Java applets are a long forgotten archaism from the early days of the web.