« TubeSock: In Honor of YouTube | Main | OpenID Sightings »
Web-Based Office Suites Need Some Jujitsu
I know several people who use Google Mail, Yahoo! Calendar, web-based feed readers and the like in an effort to free themselves from any one operating system or any single machine. You’ll see them with their Mac one day at a conference and their tablet the next—just because they can.
This works OK for them, but they’re die-hards—intent on doing it for the sake of know how it works. The big fly in the ointment is the so-called office suite: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation applications.
Oliver Rist decided to spend a week using nothing but a browser and see how things went. His story appeared in InfoWorld last week. His conclusion: the applications are mostly not worth the trouble, but ZoHo was the best of the bunch.
Writely (Google) and ZoHo’s Writer are both pretty good and you’ll find the feature sets adequate for most of what you do (go try Writer, it’s kind of fun). The problems are, as you’d expect, to be found in the interoperability with Word—something you probably can’t live without.
Oliver makes an important observation:
Google’s Writely and Spreadsheets are impressive examples of Web 2.0 technology, but neither can compete with a desktop app on its own. And neither takes enough advantage of the Web’s particular technologies as yet.From Can Web-based applications outwit, outplay, outlast the desktop? | By Oliver Rist
Referenced Tue Oct 10 2006 08:41:23 GMT-0600 (MDT)
That’s really the key point, I think. For various reasons, Web-based application will fall short of their local-app cousins for a long time to come. They win and offer value by taking advantage of the Web, not making excuses for it. A little Web jujitsu, if you will.
Posted by windley on October 10, 2006 8:43 AM
Comment from Jon Strande at October 10, 2006 2:53 PM
Phil,
Great post - and thank you for the pointer to the good article!
I think you're both right, they can't compete with their (bloated) desktop cousins *if* you use all the features of those applications. My question is how many people use all the features of those desktop apps? I've just started using Writely for basic text stuff - I love the collaboration ability - however, it can't compete with Word for a professional looking document YET. Looking at most of the documents and spreadsheets I get on a daily basis (I'm an Interaction Designer), most people could accomplish their jobs using the scaled down web-based versions (IMHO).
Thank you!
Jon
Comment from Neil Murphy at October 19, 2006 4:28 AM
Two comments 1). Their biggest limitation is they are web-only. I can't always be connected to the web, and not always by broadband, so the tools can't be used for those periods. Local processing and storage will be needed by most people until high speed net access is available on demand everywhere. 2). Jon's comment about which features people use is over simple. 80/20 does apply to most people's usage of word processors and other office type tools - but we don't all use the same 80/20 split. So the bloatware provides what 'everyone' needs, the online software probably provides most of whqat most people use.
Comment from Neil Murphy at October 19, 2006 4:29 AM
Two comments 1). Their biggest limitation is they are web-only. I can't always be connected to the web, and not always by broadband, so the tools can't be used for those periods. Local processing and storage will be needed by most people until high speed net access is available on demand everywhere. 2). Jon's comment about which features people use is over simple. 80/20 does apply to most people's usage of word processors and other office type tools - but we don't all use the same 80/20 split. So the bloatware provides what 'everyone' needs, the online software probably provides most of whqat most people use.
Leave a comment
I encourage you to leave a comment below. Your email address will not be displayed on Technometria, but allows me to communicate with you directly. Your email address won't be displayed, but will be used to compute a MicroID for your comment.