Google ‘Web Office’
on 10.04.05, 08:58am in software • comments (5)
[Slashdot] According to this post at Dirson’s blog, Google and Sun Microsystems are to announce a new and kick-ass webtool: an Office Suite based on Sun’s OpenOffice and accesible with your browser.
I guess we’ll see what all the hype is at 10:30, but right now my initial reaction is a big, fat *yawn*.
Beau (October 4, 2005 @ 8:42 pm)
Seriously? This is huge Steve. Can you imagine being able to run Word (whatever OpenOffice calls their word processor) over the Internet? Pay for one license (if that) and be able to run it on whatever Internet-connected system you are currently in front of? Centralized storage? Not needing any more horsepower in your system than what it takes to launch IE or Firefox? System recovery becomes a simple matter of reinstalling the OS? I’d pay for the ability to do that with a Microsoft product.
I don’t think you can overestimate the impact this initiative could have on computing in general. This is a huge paradigm shift.
The killer app is the network. The era of the PC is quickly coming to an end.
Steve (October 4, 2005 @ 9:09 pm)
Yeah, i’ll remember than when im on a plane trying to work on a document.
Randy (October 4, 2005 @ 9:10 pm)
Don’t forget about all the popup or in product ads you’ll have to work around. *smirk*
Paul (October 4, 2005 @ 11:18 pm)
The airplane comment is way over-used. Seriously, do you really get the majority, or even a measurable amount of your work done there? Nice try though.
Steve (October 5, 2005 @ 6:23 am)
As someone who’s spent LOTS of time in Word (writing 2 books), I can easily say that I have absolutely NO desire to write a long document in a browser. I spent alot of time on my laptop, and, regardless if I’m on a plane or not, I can’t count on *always* having connectivity to the net.
Add in the fact that I’d most likely end up having to install Java, which, to this day, I’ve been able to keep off my PC’s.