Microsoft Adds Chrome Support For Office Web Apps 46
CWmike writes "Microsoft will release the first service pack for Office 2010 in late June, when it will for the first time support Google's Chrome running the suite's online applications using SharePoint 2010, the company said on Monday. Google and Microsoft have repeatedly knocked heads over each others' online applications. In May 2010, Matthew Glotzbach, Google's enterprise product management director, kicked off the public battle by urging companies to forget about upgrading to Office 2010 and calling on them to instead add Google Docs to their mix. 'Google Docs makes Office 2003 and 2007 better,' Glotzbach said at the time. Microsoft quickly countered by saying that Google Docs' integration with Office was inferior to Office Web Applications' and that its rival's claims were 'simply not true.'"
Dear Microsoft/Google Cloud Apps: No thanks (Score:1, Interesting)
I prefer to store my documents in a secure location.
My home.
Therefore I will continue using MS Office 97 and/or LibreOffice.
$20/month/seat (Score:4, Interesting)
What people are not realizing is that Google Docs and the upcoming Android tables and Chrome laptop computer is the first real threat to the MS domination. In the past MS has maintained dominance on the theory that any PC had to be licensed with MS software because it was assumed that any naked PC was bought for the intention of pirating MS Windows. This meant that even if one wanted to run *nix, one still had to have the MS license, so where was the cost savings? Even if one built one's own machine, if one has a single MS Windows machine running, one was open to being attacked by the BSA and MS for piracy, even if everything was licensed. An disgruntled employee could easily set something up for the reward money.
With thins MS is defending itself against the upcoming machines that run the office application over the network and cannot run Windows. This is the $20/month machines that are allegedly soon to be offered by Google. Yes, these machines are going to be a disappoint to some. Yes they will not be as great as advertised. I think they will end up costing more. But they will be machines that will potentially never generate any income for MS. And they will be mass market. This is new a potentially scary territory for people would depend on MS, not to mention MS.
It is true that Google docs are to suck. But so were MS office products. It was years before MS had anything as good even as MacWrite, which was free on the Mac. It was years before MS Excel for MS Windows was nearly as good as MS Excel for Macintosh. This was so apparent that MS really did at one point degrade the user experience on Mac, and stopped developing on any number of products to keep people on Windows. But even without such intervention, $1000 for a PC versus $3000 for a Mac kept most people on the MS Windows side, even though the products on MS Windows were vastly inferior
I can use Google Docs for production work. It is not great, but it is not horrible. There are things it cannot do, but per $20 per seat including computer I can work around the issues. Some of the problems, like the spread sheet, are real. Other problems, like the word processor, are due to people thinking that everything should run like word. The presentation software is no worse than MS Powerpoint, and I can't believe that so many think Powerpoint is still legitimate software. Again, it has to do low expectations.
I think that people who license MS software wil continue to do so for some time. I would wonder about the profitability of new company that choose to spend that king of money on legacy products. It would be like basing your business on IBM Selectric in the mid 80's.