Sure, Microsoft has kicked off its challenge to Google Docs with a limited - and now closed - test trial edition of Office Web apps And yes, Microsoft has promised to fix gaps in the tools by mid-2010, when Office Web apps are officially released. With the trial edition, you can't actually create a Word or a PowerPoint document …
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Posted Friday 18th September 2009 09:37 GMT
"the line from Microsoft is that Office Web apps will "complement" Office on the desktop or smart phone, rather than match its functionality."
I can see why. Actually there are (probably) at least 2 reasons. Firstly, MSOffice is a nice lil' earner right now, and if MS wants to keep collecting the provervial golden eggs, they must avoid fucking* the golden egg chicken. Secondly, have you had a look at the size of the frigging MSOffice package recently? By 2010 they will need to ship the thing on BluRays or dedicated hard drives**. And the RAM usage is as horrendous as OpenOffice's, whithout the excuse of the JVM overhead. Even if you're a hardline Moore's law believer, it is hard to imagine that beast running smoothly across a network on a ressource-strapped mobile device (which I suppose should be the main market for networked office apps).
""The primary effort is to make sure rendering translates down to the mobile form factor quite well," Bryant said."
Well, failing that they could always try and make sure that the rendering translates well from a version of MSOffice to the other, or from one app to another in the same version of MSOffice, or even from one machine to another using the same version of the same app***. Pick any. They all badly need to be fixed.
Of course none of these concerns really matters, because in any half-serious circle one already looks like a frigging clown for using MSOffice -bonus points for use of the embedded stick-figure "art". No further harm can possibly done, unless the MBA crowd suddently gets a clue. But if these guys ^h^h^h^h persons were clue-friendly, they wouldn't have got a MBA in the fist place, would they?
Beer icon as I might have had a couple. Not this piss-poor MS lager, either. The real open source bitter deal. OK, stop the hissing, I'm gonna go home now. Would you please call me a cab? "Sure thing. You sir are a cab" WOoosh... missed
PUNCH!
WOOOOOO-sh.... bump!
Taxi? Don't mind the black eye, or the scant clothes. I'll get my coat back tomorrow.
That's all folks...
*or plucking. Or whatever FoxNY says: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/17/keep_plucking_that_chicken/
**note to the hairtrigered Redmond fans: this is meant as a _slight_ eggs-ageration.
***Actually that's a flaw in most WYSIWYG office applications: as far as rendering is involved, they all fail the machine-to-machine portability test. MSOffice is arguably the worst -with problems between apps on a single system-, but they all do fail. I am not a fan of the whole onscreen-rendering-while-you edit (WYSIWYG) thing, but if you go for it you might as well do it properly. Embedding fonts and display properties would be a good start, and now that everyone seems to be using markup languages it wouldn't even add too much to the final file size (as opposed to when changing the font color for a single character used to double the size of your MSWord document -sometimes, for some reason). The current half-baked "substitution table" solution is worst than the problem. It merely hides the issue and thus prevents you from fixing it. It's especially annoying when you send a document to collaborators for review and it comes back whith 2/3rd of the modifications being "helpful" formatting changes that you have to revert, knowing perfectly well that said collaborators spent most of their time "fixing" the layout instead of focussing on the content. How I long for the return of the glorious days of typesetting software... (LaTeX is kinda out, for reasons obvious to anyone who used this ancient and bloated thing. I much prefer Lout for general purpose combined with jgraph for fast data plotting. http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/lout/ **** and http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/jgraph/jgraph.html ****. But that's just me)
**** if El Reg's line-breaking prevents you from getting there, you're probably not worthy. Too bad. Keep using MSOffice. Do try OpenOffice on your free time, though. You'll like the "integrated suite" experience that MS keeps away from you.
Posted Friday 18th September 2009 11:06 GMT
Decent points, but you've been able to embed fonts into Office files for several releases now, so you can remove that massive rant of a paragraph.
Posted Friday 18th September 2009 11:06 GMT
"users can access their old documents and not be confronted by a startlingly new look and feel"
As in Office 2007, for instance..?
Personally, I find Thinkfree and Zoho do the business pretty well, and my son uses Google Docs to do his homework, neatly avoiding the 'dog ate my memory stick' excuse. Not that we have a dog...
Posted Monday 21st September 2009 10:08 GMT
"Decent points, but you've been able to embed fonts into Office files for several releases now, so you can remove that massive rant of a paragraph."
Fair cop, guv. You might still notice that, as pissed off my feet as I might have been at the time, I went for the safe option and actually typed "Embedding fonts and display properties would be a good start", not only a dull, dry -and somewhat innaccurate- "Embedding fonts would be a good start" thing. It might not look too different for the untrained eye, but rendering goes way beyond fonts for me. Colourspace and width-to-height ratios -to cite only two concerns out of many- ought to be taken into consideration if you're going for the "WYSIWYmightG, on a lucky day" thing. "that massive rant of a paragraph" stays where it is, buddy. Note that said paragraph was not especially targetted at MSOffice, either.
As a sidenote, I must say that, as much as I dislike MSOffice and "WYSIWYG" software by principle, I happen to use some of them from time to time, and the ease of use is somewhat appreciable for one-shot -and one-page- stuff. (Shame on me for admitting that.) They are just not really suitable for real work, and -icing on the shitcake- encourage people sending 5-MB files as mail attachment (or over the already overused local network) where 5 lines of ASCII would have conveyed the same amount of info.
Posted Wednesday 23rd September 2009 09:01 GMT
I've been wondering if Office web apps will work together with third party online collaboration platforms like HyperOffice.
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