Today a lot of Web office products are proliferating the market. The benefits they claim are
1. Free Software
2. Easy collaboration
3. Easy access to content as they are always online
4. Easy to publish and so on...
The core question i have is why should the authoring environment be on-demand. Today we have MS-Office which has been under innovation path for more than a decade now and is highly matured and also few other open source alternatives are available. Features like Collaboration, Online publishing and document storage should be provided as service and the authoring system should still be in the desktop (Like Windows Live Writer). Look at the computing power and storage we have right now in the desktop, i think there should be some tools that run on the desktop to justify this and the first choice would be Office. Even mobile devices today have huge storage and processing power.
Now if the problem is price of the software, look for an alternate pricing for desktop office suites, build subscription based pricing (Norton antivirus has this model today, for its desktop anti-virus). The other option is to consider open source office products that run on desktop. I think open source in this space is very matured today to be put for commercial use.
The only place where weboffice tools in its current form (hosted authoring environment) might find a fit is when office capabilities (say XL) are required to be integrated in hosted enterprise applications. This requirement could be solved by a re-usable Ajax component, which could be embedded with in these hosted enterprise applications.
Office is a productivity tool requiring sophisticated features to transform data, integrate various document types, write VBA scripts and so on. Let's not deprive the users the power of office by taking everything to the web.
Please let me know what you feel.
1. Free Software
2. Easy collaboration
3. Easy access to content as they are always online
4. Easy to publish and so on...
The core question i have is why should the authoring environment be on-demand. Today we have MS-Office which has been under innovation path for more than a decade now and is highly matured and also few other open source alternatives are available. Features like Collaboration, Online publishing and document storage should be provided as service and the authoring system should still be in the desktop (Like Windows Live Writer). Look at the computing power and storage we have right now in the desktop, i think there should be some tools that run on the desktop to justify this and the first choice would be Office. Even mobile devices today have huge storage and processing power.
Now if the problem is price of the software, look for an alternate pricing for desktop office suites, build subscription based pricing (Norton antivirus has this model today, for its desktop anti-virus). The other option is to consider open source office products that run on desktop. I think open source in this space is very matured today to be put for commercial use.
The only place where weboffice tools in its current form (hosted authoring environment) might find a fit is when office capabilities (say XL) are required to be integrated in hosted enterprise applications. This requirement could be solved by a re-usable Ajax component, which could be embedded with in these hosted enterprise applications.
Office is a productivity tool requiring sophisticated features to transform data, integrate various document types, write VBA scripts and so on. Let's not deprive the users the power of office by taking everything to the web.
Please let me know what you feel.
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