Signs point to Sun and Google announcing (if not releasing) today a competitor to Microsoft Office. The buzz is that it would run directly on the Web -- pretty much Microsoft's worst nightmare. a) it would no longer matter what OS you're running b) you wouldn't have to buy Office anymore.
(Of course, not everybody buys Office... or for that matter, Windows...)
The question is: how do they make money? Do they run ads next to your novel-in-progress or do they charge you $10 a month to type stuff into your computer? Neither idea sounds all that hot.
3 comments:
The thing is, are they just putting StarOffice online? I mean, Sun has had a free alternative to office that's directly interoperable with it for years, but they never really advertised it...
Online in the sense of you type in an address into your address bar and bam, you're editing a spreadsheet. I think there may have been Java-based things but Java applets suck.
Turns out the announcement is tres boring. Hope the Bill Gates imagery at least was sort of amusing.
The thing is -- It's not that farfetched to see this happening in the near future. There's already a Wordlike thing out there.
I'm not entirely sure people would trust that kind of thing...i mean, it's hard enough to get people here to store their documents on my servers (so that they can get backed up) regularly, as opposed to putting it on their own hard drive...
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