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.
Is it safe? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
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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: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.
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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: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.
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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.
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No, 25 years was an example of the simplest manifestation of the problem. For documents of historical significance, 250 and 2500 years also matter.
It's just that with time frames like those, it's almost impossible to usefully imagine what the world will be like, so we mostly encourage printing using the right paper and inks as well as proper storage.
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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.
Just move the decimal. Duh.
PDF (Score:2)
you are converting the PDF to PDF/A right?
I'd say the likelyhood of being able to access those 25 years from now is pretty good.
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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
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't the contents of .docx files tied to the (proprietary, closed, secret, patented) algorithms within MS Word?
For example, you may be able to retrieve the text (not sure) but getting your formatting to look exactly like it did in MS Word, will require MS Word.
If you want proof, find another word processing app that can display it 100% compatible with MS Word without calling any code from MS Word.
Now explain how in 25 years time when most people vaguely remember what MS Word 2010 looked like or did, you will somehow open your .docx documents and have them look as they do now. If I know Microsoft at all, I know that the OOXML "Standard" will change (read: "extend") a LOT in 25 years.
Re:Is it safe? (Score:4, Informative)
Somehow, I don't think that 25 years from now, people will care if it looks exactly like it looked now, as long as the text and section headings, toc and index, tables and lists... are intact, recoverable, and comprehensible by an archivist, and from there perhaps into public hands.
The best way to store a document isn't PDF. While the spec is open, the documents may not be -- copy and paste disabled, passwords, etc. PDF is a format with easily used features designed to LIMIT access. That's a hella poor choice for an archive format.
Text files - perhaps unicode files, today - are the best option. Markup languages like HTML are excellent because they let the viewer set the presentation to a great extent; section subheading sizes, font sizes, etc. Until we can edit defects out of the genome and repair all injuries, we also should be considering accessability. PDF, again, bad choice. Everything is determined by the document. HTML or something like it is oodles better: You set the font size, feed it almost directly to a reader, etc.
And as for formats like .doc and so on... no. Just, no.
But as bad as format issues are...
Storage media is worse.
You want to read your 1970's STWPC FLEX text files? I can do it for you. Not only do I have a working system with usable drives at 35, 40 and 80 track, single and double density, I also have a working emulation so once i have your data, I can put it up in software that was meant to understand it.
That's your most serious problem. Not the data format -- the data storage medium. better make it easy to transfer from a to b to c to n... because otherwise, it'll be like FLEX files... right now, I'm one of very few people in the world that can still read the original floppies. And I'm getting old, and am definitely not all that healthy.
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If you are discussing OOXML Standard
Then there are two : ECMA-376 which Word 2010 supports (But so does Word 2007 and OpenOfficeOrg)
and : ISO/IEC 29500 which Word 2010 does not support .... and neither does anything else (Microsoft are "working towards" the 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?
Re:Is it safe? (Score:5, Informative)
I concur. I make programs that generate documents based on some of these 'open' standards.
- LaTeX is really the only thing you can trust if you want an editable text document. However (sadly) outside of scientific literature it's hardly used.
- PDF and PostScript is great if you want a read only document, it works but I don't think it's really an open standard. It's more of a form of output, not really a form of carrying information.
- ODF is an open standard and works really well but sadly not all editors interpret all tags the same.
- OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser, you can generate documents programmatically according to the OOXML standard but a lot of the functionality (simple things like hyperlinks) will be misinterpreted by Microsoft Office and possibly corrupt the document (unreadable to all) if re-saved in Office.
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> - OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser
And don't forget that even if/when the XML is valid, XML has no semantics and making sense of it is not necessarily any easier than making sense of any random bunch of bits, and can be harder because you need to deal with the overhead of the XML representation [cat-v.org].
XML doesn't really add any value to the format other than bloat and complexity.
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PDF is an open format and should load in 25 years just just fine. Technically, it's practically just a zipped Postscript which was invented about 25 years ago.
DOC I suggest you save to PDF.
There's lots of advantages to XML over PDF - metadata support for one - reliable plain text extraction for another - but it is technically an open standard.
Use a Virtual Machine? (Score:2)
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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 PDF/A [wikipedia.org] is being used, I'd say your chances are pretty darn good that the files will be accessible in twenty-five years. From the wiki page: audio, video, javascript, and encryption are not allowed in PDF/A files. Use of standardized metadata is mandated, and *all* fonts used must be embedded. IOW it's a simplified, well defined file format.
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What platforms do these readers work on?
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Sure, if only we could open Office documents on the iPad we'd never have to worry about losing are ability to read them.
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"Fucking MS zealot nutter motherfucker."
That's quite a mouthful. Can we just call you AC?
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I think it will be hard for MS to start charging for the free version consider there not much to the free version anyway.
How exactly do you pitch this to management? (Score:3, Funny)
How about something like this?
"Well, you see, Google got hacked, they had the code to their global authentication taken, who knows what the hackers found there and what access they've got now... So, we decided to go with Microsoft instead."
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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) Share
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?
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Because Times New Roman is boring, and they don't know you can change Notepad's default font to Comic Sans anyways.
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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...)
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It's stupid thinking like that that led to bad decisions through a badly-done powerpoint presentation that resulted in the shuttle disaster.
If it's an important decision, it shouldn't be made fast, and it should be made by someone who can actually understand the information without it being dumbed down and pre-digested.
Look at the case
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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.
Microsoft is offering an 'on-premise' version of Office 2010 Web Apps, so no reliance on an internet connection or requirement to have your data on third party servers.
I think a lot of people have missed this point.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/ee815687.aspx
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Requires .EXE Download (Score:5, Informative)
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As a number of people in the Seattle Times Forum have noted, using this "web based" Office product *requires* downloading and installing an .exe
IEXPLORER.EXE ?
That *is* an interesting thought. Which browsers does Online Office 2010 work with? If it requires an .exe that kind of excludes Linux & Mac users (not to mention thise crazy enough to try it on their smart phones).
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:4, Informative)
It does not. It works with plain old JS and CSS in IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome on Mac/PC.
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It uses Silverlight if it's available to improve rendering fidelity (you can't do pixel-perfect text rendering in a browser otherwise, because you don't control the browser's text rendering engine) - but it still does work without Silverlight.
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If you want to go through the same hassle to open local files you go though with other online office suites, it is not required.
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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 overal
Re:Requires .EXE Download (Score:5, Informative)
You aren't allowed to create new documents on their service without installing it.
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You can.
Gee, that was simple. I didn't even need to give a reference, because neither did you.
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You can definitely create new documents in Office Web Apps preview in SkyDrive [labnol.org]. Indeed, I just tried that a moment ago - there's a "New" button on the toolbar while browsing folders, which expands to the list of document types. Here [msdn.com] is even a blog post from the team explaining this and showing a screenshot.
I do wonder where that FUD comes from - there seems to be a proliferation of posts in this discussion claiming that this functionality is missing, so, apparently, people are getting it from somewhere?
Parent IS NOT "informative". (Score:5, Informative)
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The exe is only necessary to allow Windows shell integration with the online Office service, i.e., so you can double click on a docx on your desktop and have it open in the web office. If you want to go through the same hassle to open local files you go though with other online office suites, it is not required.
Oh... I thought it was required to enable/implement certain .NET capabilities and Silverlight - through which this "integration" you speak of actually takes place.
Sorry I misunderstood what the exe really was... regardless, I am not about to take a chance that I am wrong. I dont use IE, and I am not about to make any other browser as insecure.
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IEXPLORER.EXE ?
Nope. Sorry, should have made it clear, some kind of "helper" exe. But I wonder, does it work on any browser or only IE? That I don't know. Perhaps the "helper" exe is an... (get ready) ActiveX componant? Of course they are not calling them that anymore...
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 ;)
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su changes to another (priveleged, presumably) user and requires that user's password
sudo merely allows you elevated privileges based on your own account and does not require sharing a password. Changes made are still logged as being done by you, ownership doesn't change, etc. It is less of a security risk than su since you don't have to share the password of a priveleged account.
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though I don't like having to type my password in for system updates or to use sudo
This is no different than using Windows from a limited user account, which you should already be using. If you are not, you are being silly. Updates are an administrative task and thus belong to administrator, not Joe or Jane in Sales.
su - requires root's password
sudo - doesn't require root's password - no password sharing. It also allows you to unset root's password so users can't login as root directly, and cough "guests
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If you read the thread you linked to you would have found plausible solutions on the 1st page.
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Screw that. Fancy Graphical Newsletters should be created in Scribus not OO Draw.
Oh joy! More Cloud computing (Score:2)
Two weeks ago my entire office was shut down for doing any real work, because all our work data is on a shared drive located on the network. Problem was that our office was being re-carpeted and the temp space they moved us into
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So now the PHB's in the upper offices find this and think it's great, and move everyone to this. Great! Until the day the network has problems. Or you have to finish that presentation but are temporarily sitting in an office with no network because yours is getting remodeled.
And therefore this thing is completely useles!
Wow, congrats, you should tell Microsoft why this product is completely pointless and utterly sucks. I'm sure they'll be interested to hear your insights.
Two weeks ago my entire office was
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.
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.
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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.
Yea, that works for me as well. MS has always been a fast follower; letting someone else build the market and then moving in to capitalize on it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
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MS actually came out with something like this years ago before google did. They had search before google too.
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That's true, so long as all you're trying to search is C:
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MS actually came out with something like this years ago before google did. They had search before google too.
Lots of people had search before Google. It's just that most of them did a lousy job of it.
Don't forget GUID. (Score:4, Interesting)
Who cares if it's free, if you don't want it anyway?
Re:Don't forget GUID. (Score:5, Funny)
Remember that all Office applications embed a GUID in the document. My guess would be that the online version would as well. So your privacy is up for grabs.
Oh joy! Does this mean I'll be able to track my documents via Facebook or will Facebook just do it for me without my knowledge?
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Cool, huh? Except that the potential for abuse is far larger than any good such data would be used for.
People on the Web need to wise up to the concept that mere existence of personal data creates a potential
Re:Don't forget GUID. (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft used it once to track down a virus writer. You may remember that case. But what it boils down to is that Office "called home" and reported to Microsoft what this person's GUID was. And Microsoft looked it up in their database to find the person who originally authored a Word macro virus.
This is false - though typical Slashdotist - anti-Microsoft hysteria.
What actually happened was simple, old-fashioned police work. The original upload of Melissa was tracked to a newsgroup posting, which was subsequently tracked to an IP address belong to an AOL account. The police got the logs for that account from AOL, identified the address of the number that dialed into it, and then arrested the resident along with seizing their computer.
The only role the GUID played was as supporting evidence that the document containing Melissa was, in fact, created on the computer that they had seized. It was also used fairly extensively throughout the computing world to identify other viruses that had been written by the same author, as they all had the same GUID.
No phoning home. No centralised database of Office users. No conspiracy.
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It is true that I am not particularly fond of Microsoft as a company, but I did not make this up. It came from the "horse's mouth", as it were.
Re:Don't forget GUID. (Score:4, Funny)
Remember that all Office applications embed a GUID in the document. My guess would be that the online version would as well. So your privacy is up for grabs.
Look...
We're talking about storing documents - as in, text, spreadsheets, etc - in "the cloud". Which is to say, the storage provider has full access to their contents.
What. Fucking. Privacy?
you can wiki it (Score:2)
but the short version is that it is a very long funky number that should be unique to whatever
S.O.B. (Score:2)
Trying to do a cloud version of what they did with Office 97's monopoly underpricing against WordPerfect. We'll see how it works this time.
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WordPerfect was effectively dead long before Office 97 came along.
Free is a good price (Score:2)
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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.
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It's free to put your foot in bear trap.
Once you have all your documents in OOXML format, then what happens when Microsoft can no longer provide the service for free? Or what if the free version of OOXML is not compitable with Office-2012?
I don't know if that will happen, but from what I know of Microsoft's history, it seems possible, even likely.
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.
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Two words:
Display Postscript.
That's what you just described. The only thing is that Display Postscript always had an onerous licensing scheme so it got dropped as a technology by nearly everyone. Adobe could revive it tomorrow if they wanted and XPS would be a smoking crater. The only question is if they're smart enough to do it.
--
BMO
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?
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No, XAML is the new HTML. At least if Microsoft get its way. Get thee to Wikipedia and read. It's very comprehensive. Put the blinders on if you wish, but don't say I didn't warn you. .NET is subservient to XAML. .NET is an effort to herd the corporate developers to XAML. XAML has always underlied .NET.
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Silverlight is not a "subset" of XAML, not anymore than XHTML is a "subset" of XML. Rather, Silverlight is an application of XAML, and is a subset of WPF [wikipedia.org].
XAML, by itself, is nothing but an XML-based markup language to describe trees of objects (and arbitrary graphs in XAML 2009), with an object model mapping more or less directly to that of CLR (though nothing precludes you from using it in C++ or Java). It doesn't care what the classes are, or what properties they have - it works with those concepts in a g
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.
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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
You seem to have almost answered your question. Msft has been successful at vendor lock-in, in the past, but now more people are wise to the scam. And now msft has to compete with google docs, and for the first time in a long time, msft may not be able to fully control the document standard. Some governments, and major institutions are taking a hard look at ODF.
Msft hates and fears ODF. Why do you think msft went so totally balistic - bribing judges etc - to get their OOXML accepted as an ISO standard. Msft
will this remain free indefinitely? (Score:2)
Only if viable alternatives still exist. Once they are put down, then it will be converted to a pay service.
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: (Score:2, Troll)
"Fortunately for the world, MS just don't know how to create a superior product."
Yes, it would be tragic if MS created a superior product. OMG! It's already happened! Quick, duct tape the Windows! Down to the basement! Oh, I forgot the depends!...
On RTF- it's a subset. (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft will offer a product which does some of what Office 2010 does but which does not offer key features and does not offer 24/7 uptime.
There is no promise to support the product for any particular time, so based on past history, the product will change every 3-4 years and at least once per decade, prior data will become unsupported to lesser or greater degrees.
I really disliked office 2010. I can buy it for $10 if I want to. It was slower and it was unable to print a lot of my complicated office 200
Re:Change in business model ? (Score:4, Funny)
And at what point will there be a free windows version?
When they can get it to run in internet explorer.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
"Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue."
Yes. And they see those days are passing away and moving on towards the second best: SaaS.
* Main advantage for them: they rent the services so if they carefully stablish their lock-in strategy they'll be securing their revenues forever; you won't even have the option to lock the computer and "freeze" it in time using your same old licenses for as long as it does the work (th
Re:More to the point (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Dude! Repeat after me: "<p> </p> and <br /> work on Slashdot". Geez!
Hitting [ENTER] works well too, and Slashdot will auto-convert it to the appropriate HTML for you. Choose your message options as "Plain Old Text" which also allows you to insert links, style it bold or italic, quote text, insert ordered or unordered lists, and so on. Who the hell manually enters paragraph or line break tags on Slashdot anymore?
Re:second post (Score:5, Funny)
You have shit on your dick? And you're calling someone else a "faggot"?
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.
The cheap shot. (Score:2)
That first sample of crack is free too!
No, it ain't.
You want a sampling of MS Office?
There is the 2010 Beta. The 60 day trial on your new PC. The Docs for Facebook Beta...
Sales are quite good as well. MS Office Home & Student 2007 [amazon.com] No. 1 in software sales. 1,231 Days in the top 100. Free upgrade to F&S 2010 if purchased before September 30.
Re: (Score:2)
"Desktop applications re-written in JavaScript suck, especially if they are made by Microsoft"
Sure I have trouble with the dozen desktop applications that MS re-wrote in JavaScript too. What were their names again?
Have you tried NeoOffice? (Score:2)
That said, I've recently upgraded my version of OO.org to 3.2 on Ubuntu and it's significantly faster than then previous version.