17 Web Based Competitors to MS Office 153
prostoalex writes "Red Herring magazine takes a look at 17 projects in the Web 2.0 space competing with Microsoft Office for the attention of the office workers worldwide. The table lists Thinkfree, Zoho Writer, Writeboard, Google Writely, Rallypoint and JotSpot Live as Microsoft Word competitors, JotSpot Tracker, Numsum, iRows, Zoho Street as Microsoft Excel alternatives, S5, Zoho Show as PowerPoint contenders, ThinkFree, gOffice and Zoho Virtual Office as suite offerings. Even Microsoft Project has its fair share of Web 2.0 competitors: Basecamp and JotSpot Project Manager made the list."
Duh. (Score:4, Funny)
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Laptop or Internet... Speed or Lag... Backups under my control, or trust a third party... Hmmm...
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Interesting)
I use gmail for mail, moin moin [wikiwikiweb.de] (not exactly web 2.0 and not hosted by someone else, but who cares) for all our documentation, writely for documents I share with people outside of my project. I don't want to take care of spam, synchronize ~/.evolution whenever I switch computers, configure mail server (and any other service that's not necessary... hell, I even use afraid.org [afraid.org] so that I don't have to mess with bind. Web based solutions are great if all you care is ease of use, convenience and saving time.
Haven't tried any spreadsheets yet, but whenever (not often) I have to edit something that we've done in Excell (long time ago), OOo v.1.x (some time ago, b4 Ubuntu Breezy was out, I think) and OOo v.2.x, it's a real pain in the ass (converting to ods, taking care of permission, so that others can overwrite files, etc.). Having some hosted, based on ODF spreadsheet solution would be sweet.
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Not so bad, really. (Score:4, Insightful)
here I was, thinking I could write a text document without Internet access. How stupid of me.
Just think, some people think they can share text without Microsoft Word. Amazing isn't it?
That's really what this is about, being able to co-operate in authoring formated text without having to sync everyone's $400 text editor. If all you want is to mod a configuration file, by all means use a free vi. If you have to co-operate with ten other people to make formatted text output, these services will be much cheaper and easier than the brain dead method common in the fortune 500 world, "standardizing on M$ Office" and the swapping bloated results via email. For internal documentation, these people should be moving to wikis. For anyone who still needs paper, and I'm not sure why they do, web services are a great way to go.
SSH tunnel + VNC + OO.org (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just a thought...
Place a curse on the RIAA MPAA and Microsoft [i-curse.com]
Re:SSH tunnel + VNC + OO.org (Score:5, Insightful)
You think Joe (or Jane) Businessman has any idea what ssh is? Or why on earth you're saving something to anywhere other than your hard drive?
I'll admit, you have a cool setup (as cool as ssh and vnc gets anyway), but it really doesn't help the average business person in the same way that many of TFA's apps do.
Being able to access documents via the web from anywhere needs to be as easy as possible for regular joe's, otherwise they have no reason to leave MS Office.
Re:SSH tunnel + VNC + OO.org (Score:5, Funny)
That would depend a good deal on the basic competence of his IT staff, wouldn't it?
KFG
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That way it can be much easier to access all resources from all over the world. Managers love that. Web-desktop can just be the Next Big Thing (TM) because it is available ANYWHERE with net-access.
And you should know users. As soon as their company uses this tech, they will use it from home too.
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It certainly seems to me that if Joe or Jane doesn't know what secure protocols are, they probably shouldn't be sending company data over the Internet.
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That's all great for uber l337 folks like yourself, but what about the rest of the world?
For business users, their IT staff should be hooking them up with some sort of VPN, or at least SSL access to the businesses own web server. For home users, TFA's apps are probably good, but I, for one, don't particularly like my data on other people's servers (and I don't think I would even if I didn't know any better).
Being able to access documents via the web from anywhere needs to be as easy as possible for re
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I completely agree with you, though I wanted to point out that not every business can afford an IT staff.
That's fair. I've not dealt with IT support of companies of that size, and I suppose hosted services would be worthwhile for that, especially if they don't have the sort of information they're worried about being out in the open. It's one thing to have customer/personal correspondence through another company's e-mail server, but quite another if you're sending company confidential data between emplo
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And with Micosoft SharePoint server (SharePortal Server), you will be able to access your documents from anywhere via the web.
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What is so hard about the following:
That's not really harder than say with writely:
Both procedures should be within the capabilities of most normal com
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From Wikipedia's OpenOffice.org article:
The project and software are informally referred to as "OpenOffice", but project organizers report that this term is a trademark held by another party, requiring them to adopt "OpenOffice.org" as its formal name,[1] and abbreviated as OOo or OO.o.
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It's an order of magnitude faster than VNC, and you have SSH encription built-in.
Web 2.0 office apps (Score:4, Interesting)
Clarification (Score:3, Funny)
I meant "users"... (Score:2)
Re:Web 2.0 office apps (Score:5, Insightful)
The very fact that there are 17 of them tells you that at least 15 of them are not competing with Office any more than a kid on a bicycle is competing with Lance Armstrong.
Office is a mature turnkey desktop office suite for enterprise accounts (that sucks). These things are one step away from vapourware serving no one in particular.
Hype hype hype hype. AJAX hype AJAX.
Re:Web 2.0 office apps (Score:4, Insightful)
For now they are competing with each other, but at some point they will get into the way of Microsoft. Hope they are rife enough by then.
And remember that Lance Armstrong was a kid on a bicycle once too.
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"will" is vastly different from the more correct "could possibly"
Don't hold your breath waiting for that, though.
They missed... (Score:5, Informative)
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"In March, Microsoft's online nemesis Google acquired an online word processing startup, Writely. Soon after that, it introduced its own version of an online spreadsheet. "Earlier we were a lone voice in the wilderness, but Google's acquisition of Writely had validated the business," said Mr. Kang."
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Re:They missed... (Score:5, Funny)
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I knew you were being funny, but the fact of the matter is that while a bunch of applications in the Office suite sucks, Excel is just incredibly great. It does a million different things, some of them outstandingly well, most very well and almost nothing in an awful way.
Excel is so incredibly versatile, which is a blessing (when you are the user solving that particular ad hoc problem) and a curse (when you are the IT person trying to put all of your company's data in p
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The thought that Excel is used to do anything serious involving decision making beyond simple spreadsheet calculations in the real world gives me the creeps.
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Workflow (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen serveral groups of people already setup a basecamp and a writely account in order to colaberate on personal or non-work related projects, and it's starting to work. It's a new way of thinking that will take some time to bring to the light of day, but should make for an intresting "upgrade" to the current ways in which people work.
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With recent affairs of laptop full a confidential information lost, some companies have become really paranoid about corporate information. I'm not certain they will jump at the first opportunity to store their most confidential documents ( internal memo, contract drafts, internal documentation,
What's the point? (Score:2)
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Now I'll just get back to hacking my text in nano, tyvm...
-uso.
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I don't see this being the perfect solution for home users. They're being developed on the Internet, but real revenue would come
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I hear the echo of someone behind a glass wall asking me why I need anything more than punchcards and green bar paper..
I'm from the future. (Score:5, Funny)
I know that sounds crazy, but you have to believe me. When I went to sleep last night, it was 2006 -- nearly seven years from now!
We had long since buried what you people, in this section of spacetime, circa December 1999, call "the new economy." We renamed that "the dot-com bubble." Over six long years, we learned to deeply regret having funded mediocre, copycat websites with humdrum ideas, cute names and wayyyy too much money to burn.
This "Red Herring" you read so avidly went out of a business after peaking at 600 pages. All of the startups it writes about and collects advertising checks from will soon be out of business.
I can't give away too much, because I've seen Back to the Future and know how dangerous it can be to frig with the timespace continuum. But I have a clue for you: when you see a cluster of companies whose names all sound like Atari 2600 games, WALK AWAY. I mean, seriously, "Rallypoint?" NumSum? S5?
Oh, also? There's going to be a presidential election soon. No matter how alike you think the candidates are, vote for the one from Tennessee, not from Texas. The Texas guy is a FRIGGIN' FRIGTARD.
Anyway, I gotta go try and crash some dot-com parties [blogspot.com] before I go to sleep tonight and end up back in 2006. Adios dot-com amigos!
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They used to be insightful, but IMHO, their main target audience is now in India and that region of the world.
Killer Apps - Calc for me. (Score:1)
Not counting special exports into MS office products, I don't do anything fancy with word processing. So I really have my eyes on Open Office Calc (and perhaps Thunderbird). Calc is in "Beta 2" as I recall. Let's say they're a year out from si
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Along similar lines... (Score:2)
I'm doing work on one project right now that's making use of both. For my purposes, Basecamp is more useful, but I don't see project manager types replacing MS Project or other PM systems with it any time soon. It's just not the same kind of thing.
Look at what they are selling and see the answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
How is a word processor considered a competition for the entire office suite?
If you read so much as the summary, you would have noticed spreadsheets and presentation tools too. Those will go a long way to competing, even if they don't have as many features.
If you understand what M$ is selling with M$ Office, you understand why the new services are such a great threat. What M$ is selling is the ability of "information workers" to co-operate in the creation of "complex business documents". What that b
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This reads like a joke but from the tone of the rest of the post, you sound serious. If so, I pity you and the coworkers you select applications for, if there are any. (Somehow, i doubt that.) Features are the very reason you buy stuff. Not all features are valuable to everyone, of course, but a complete lack of features is useless to everyone.
You also talk about the reliability of web services. I wish you were right, but yo
Re:Look at what they are selling and see the answe (Score:2)
So far, so good, spelling errors aside. The feature race Microsoft got into with WordPerfect Office and Lotus SmartSuite created a lo
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Easy, if you don't talk about the rest as being "competitors", however smartass ide that might be, you can't make MS Office a winner, or do you ? Nothing new.
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What are you trying to say?
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I know that folks here are going to dis this stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Put it this way: I've been thinking about getting a MacBook but haven't wanted to run NeoOffice on it while running OpenOffice everywhere else. Beyond that, OpenOffice is a beast that can do most anything even when 95% of what I do is type plain text with minor formatting. Having the option of Writely that works in Firefox which, in turn, works on everything, is a bonus for me and opens up all sorts of options.
All that said, I know that there will be times when the network will be down. I'll have other options. But as the network reliability has increased I worry less and less about this sort of thing.
Say what you want about this or that other solution or about the redundancy of this, but couple it with Gmail and it's something on the order of a killer-app.
Re:I know that folks here are going to dis this st (Score:2)
Plus, your documents won't look like ass. Major bonus.
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I've been using Gmail as a kind of portable text editor that keeps track of all my files online and it's good, but these
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People who are already handy with LaTeX can use it to do just about anything with it, but I would make the same observation about PowerPoint users.
LaTeX is not an editor. When I work with LaTeX I actually use Lyx, a GUI editor designed
Re:I know that folks here are going to dis this st (Score:2)
Re:I know that folks here are going to dis this st (Score:2)
The common complaint is that OO.org ru
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Re:I know that folks here are going to dis this st (Score:2)
This means that there is definitely marketspace for desktop, offline-based office apps, and the web tools are
Don't you think...? (Score:1)
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Check out MICROSOFT's wrongdoing (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, check out what MS has been up to (the short list) http://home.comc [comcast.net]
List missing 'charity' influence (Score:2)
Interesting link, but it's missing MS' use of "charitable contributions", epsecially in the developing world.
There's more published, especially in local papers, but as you see in the Salon article, it's part of an combination investment/PR campaign and both MS reps and shills come down on any thing other than "Yay Bill!" So questions and/or critiqu
Sadly... (Score:5, Insightful)
All is not lost, of course, because MS got lazy - or just plain dropped the ball - during the time it had bought itself by crushing Web development, what with the Vista delays, and the chair-throwing headache of their inscrutable arch-nemesis Google, et cetera. And lets not forget the heroics of Firefox!
Anyways, people have a good reason to be skeptical about the actual apps in TFA, but keep in mind: These are but the first generation of a breed of software that has waited a long, painful time to become reality.
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If the industry really wants to a have a clean design for web apps, they need to come up with a new set of protocols that are designed specifically for these applications. Otherwise it's going to be cookies and scripting as far as the eye can see.
Perhaps I wasn't clear (Score:2)
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And of course, unlike Netscape, Microsoft didn't need to directly profit from MSIE; to them, it was merely a strategic tool to keep their monopoly on firm ground.
EditGrid Online Spreadsheet (Score:4, Interesting)
I sampled both and have committed many useful spreadsheets to my EditGrid account. They are constantly updating features and have yet to screw it up in the process from what I've seen.
In many ways, I find the online features more useful than Excel:
On the other hand, you couldn't pry my copy of Office 2000 (in particular Excel) from my cold dead hands. It's a very powerful, fast, and well established tool, period.
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To little too late (Score:1)
So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Basecamp + Writeboards = Great Document Collab. (Score:3, Interesting)
The great thing about being web based is that we all see the same thing, and the document history of Writeboards is great to flip back through time to see the changes we have made.
Now I don't see this as a replacement to Word for daily business use, but for document collaboration it is truly a great tool.
Good job guys.
Somebody's done their reading (Score:1)
OOo at home and on the run (Score:3, Informative)
greastest threat to Office is MS's own old soft (Score:2, Insightful)
Office is the one thing Microsoft got right, and it's done, finished, paid for.
The google thing looks nice, but there's no logical need to be online, so why? To decrease user privacy and gain more marketing info?
This is great (Score:4, Insightful)
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I mean, when your network is down, you're on your own. So the trick then is just to have offline equivalents of your online programs. And once your system goes online again, it syncs everything up again in one shot.
I agree completely with the idea of having offline access to your files, but the point of all this "web competition" is the collaborative/groupware aspect, not the slim software setup.
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If you're using a hosted app, what do you do with your laptop if you take it out of the office and can't get back into the corporate network, or access to where-ever its hosted?
Zoho writer? (Score:2)
Well now (Score:2, Funny)
"17 alternatives to the car"
"17 alternatives to living in a house"
"17 alternatives to working"
"17 alternatives to breathing"
All feasable, none very likely
I know who the winner is going to be. (Score:5, Insightful)
When people discover that they can use a better word processor AND not have to worry about working on shared material with their Word-bound colleagues, you'll see adoption soar in the non-geek workplace.
Nothing comes close... (Score:2, Insightful)
Writely and the other text processors are at the level of Windows Write, a way to enter text with some rich text formatting. I mean, forget Table of Contents or an Equation Editor (things I use in most documents), where are rulers, the user-defined tabs or the footnotes? How can you expect me to take these web apps seriously when I can't even set th
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Um, pot, the kettle called....
Re:Nothing comes close... YET (Score:2)
>cell formatting to include the Euro sign ()
>instead of US Dollar.
YET. Dude, it's *Google*. By next week, it'll
let you *print* friggin Euros for free
Runtime Error - Line 396 (Score:2)
This is the sort of thing that discourages people from relying on Web Based applications.
Basecamp (Score:2)
Oh, so THAT'S what Web 2.0 means! (Score:3, Funny)
Monad (Score:3, Insightful)
Geee... I suppose that's also why Microsoft is overhauling their command-line shell [wikipedia.org], because it is so f**king useless. What looks like crap to the PHB isn't always crap to the guy who keeps that beautifully integrated Outlook/Exchange combo and all of those nifty organizational tools that management types like to play with working so deliciously smoothly.
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No one is forcing you to use this service. If you're concerned about the privacy aspect, don't use it, or don't put your personal documents onto their servers. Just because you aren't confident in the service's privacy protection doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't use it to share and collaborate on other documents, especially ones that don't contain private or sensetive information.
True, but... (Score:2)
Instead of saving your documents online, why not save them on a thumb drive? That way you don't have to worry about actually having the program, and your data remains with you. True, you have the extra step of making sure your data is only saved on your thumb drive, but I like the idea of just carrying your data and not worrying about specific programs.