Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Who, us? An Office suite? Never.

Re: Who, us? An Office suite? Never.

Raju Vegesna — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:28:36 -0000

Google certainly doesn't want to call themselves an office suite...but when you search for 'Online Office' in Google, the first ad that comes up is 'Office tools from Google' :)

Re: Who, us? An Office suite? Never.

Mathew — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:04:04 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Vanessa. I still think the answer is apps and services that blend online and offline, the way that Zoho is trying to. That's where I expect Google to go next -- and perhaps Microsoft as well. I certainly would be if I were them.

Re: Who, us? An Office suite? Never.

Vanessa Williams — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:38:50 -0000

I think Mary Jo Foley is dead-on about businesses not wanting to store data in the cloud. It's a fact. And while Paul K. may be right about SMB's preferring this over paying the full cost of MS Office, there are other ways to do this (OpenOffice, for example), which are a) free, and b) don't force you to turn over your business communications to a third-party.

There is surely room for all these sorts of solutions, and new types we haven't seen (much of) yet, besides.

It's tempting to search for a single, elegant, unified theory of network-centric applications, but unifiying the desktop and the web may turn out to be like unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics: a real brain-bender.