Google and Sun

Their plan is to start an online office suite, based on OpenOffice. Is this the end of MS Office? Is this the end of Microsofts desktop OS dominance? Will Google and Sun trash Microsoft? Watch at 10:30am PT 1:30pm ET and find out.

Depends if "Google Office" has a subscription fee or is ad-supported or not.

What happened to the previous "Sun" and "Microsoft" cooperation?  Is that now coming to an end? Or...did it ever really even exist?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-5186295.html

W3bbo wrote:

Depends if "Google Office" has a subscription fee or is ad-supported or not.

That's what people want. Working on your financial spreadsheet and a flash ad for Toyota pops up.

billh wrote:

What happened to the previous "Sun" and "Microsoft" cooperation?  Is that now coming to an end? Or...did it ever really even exist?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-5186295.html

Good question...however

I believe Google is building this from StarOffice which I think (And probably wrong) is a derivitive of OpenOffice, so I think Google and customize it all they want with Sun and technically get away with it...

HOWEVER I do think that it's dirty that they did it. They got off the hook with Microsoft and that lawsuit and go and do something like this.[C]

Harlequin wrote:

W3bbo wrote: Depends if "Google Office" has a subscription fee or is ad-supported or not.

That's what people want. Working on your financial spreadsheet and a flash ad for Toyota pops up.

I personally wont by a car out of Poogle Point unless it's for a Ford.

Bring on a complete desktop experiance via DHTML.

That would rock, I mean seriously what do most people do? IM, Word, Browse, that's it...

Multimedia will still be for the computer because we don't have the bandwidth today to provide video and streaming anything. Some of us do, but people like me still live out in suberbia where all I can get is 3 megabit dsl.

It sounded like they might go the route of integrating Google Web services (Search, Maps and Earth, Books, Research, etc) into StarOffice rather than provide a DHTML-based Web interface to StarOffice.  I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I suspect a DHTML based Office would be like Channel9's Rich Text Editor. In other words, crap.

What about all those people that don't have broad band for GOffice or Google Point or GWord or whatever they call it.  Seems to limit your customer base.

How would regulators, examiners and auditors deal w/ this issue.  "So you type your board reports and create your financial docs on what application and save it on whose server?"

Imagine the nightmare

isn't open office written in Java?  So this would just be a java applet right?

 

I have read various blogs that think it will be some hybrid of Java and Ajax to increase functionality?

Nata1 wrote:

isn't open office written in Java?  So this would just be a java applet right?

Last time I checked, OO was mostly written in C++, with bits o' Java sprinkled here and there. It's been several years since I've persused the source though, so they may have migrated much of it to Java. That would be a bit surprising, though, since OO is a large collection of applications and, when I saw it, it made heavy use of C++ templates, and I don't know if Java Std.Ed. 5.0 has been out long enough for them to tackle it. Plus you have to keep in mind that many people still equate client-side java with lousy performance; when it was first released, it took a ridiculous amount of time to load and they "fixed" this by adding a service that started when you loged in that loaded most of the components ahead of time. I'm curious to see if this is resolved in 2.0, but I haven't had time or patience to play around with it.

Anyways... there's a long answer to an easy question.

Short answer: not very likely.

Larsenal that reads to me that the link will be up by 10.15 at the latest, not that you can't connect after that - rather they don't want you to connect before that. Personally I'm not going to install Real just to watch ..

Cybermagellan wrote:

HOWEVER I do think that it's dirty that they did it. They got off the hook with Microsoft and that lawsuit and go and do something like this.

Do you have that the wrong way around? I thought Microsoft paid Sun to settle the Java lawsuit - not the other way around.

Looks like it might have been a washout anyway..

too late...

When trying to get in on the webcast at 10:17am PST, I saw
Note: The links will be active no later than 10:15am Pacific Time on 10/4.

And it says the webcast doesn't start until 10:30am PST.

EDIT:  I guess I misread it because the links didn't work for me.  Click first, then read if it doesn't work.

Rossj wrote:

Looks like it might have been a washout anyway..

Agreed.

So, have they actually announced anything yet, apart from giving me more work to do to make sure the Google Toolbar doesn't install when I install Java?

 

And this "they'll run OpenOffice over the web" thing.  Why?  Because OOo doesn't take long enough to load already?