Can free web-based apps deliver where it counts?
Office software often falls foul of the 80/20 rule – the idea that you're likely to use only 20 per cent of the features in an application 80 per cent of the time.
For all the hundreds of features in a package like Microsoft Office, you'll probably rely on only a small subset of them.
The others are reduced to being either features that are 'nice to have' or functionality that is effectively useless.
But this is good news for the competition. You don't need to replicate all of Office's features to offer a viable alternative; simply offer a package that does enough.
What's depressing is that they're all much of a muchness as far as operation goes. You can easily jump between something like OpenOffice.org and AbiWord without noticing much of a difference. And when you do, it's usually going to be an unflattering one.
Take Google Docs. On the one hand, you've got an online word processor complete with offline functionality. On the other, it's far behind the times when it comes to actual day-to-day tasks. Its spreadsheet module lacks basic features like letting you start graph axes at relevant data instead of at zero.
Its word processor is more like filling out a glorified text box, lacking the comfortable margins and style controls of even basic word processing applications. Does this matter? Not to Google, but it does leave the Docs module feeling more like an online scribble pad than an industrial tool. It definitely doesn't have Microsoft quaking in its money bin. Not yet, anyway.
Just too good
Part of the problem is that Microsoft Office is excellent. It's overpriced, no question – it borders on the ridiculous that a standard copy of OneNote costs £70 – but it's nevertheless one of the few packages out there that's not simply the most popular but also unquestionably the best.
Outlook is the only real choice for industrial-level email on the PC, with the '.doc' format the accepted standard everywhere you go. It's not simply the file format that's supported by just about everything under the sun; many things to do with Office – such as the macros and the page layouts – are also standard. An office application that doesn't support it isn't even worth looking at.
But it's notable that Office 2007's new and improved '.docx' format has yet to take off. This is proof enough that Microsoft is feeling the pinch as much as its competitors are. Exactly how do you make something as complete as the Office suite more desirable? And more importantly, how do you make it more desirable when individuals have to shell out nearly £100 just for the Home and Student edition?
This is where Google has an advantage, along with Zoho Office, Thinkfree and other large company side projects like the extremely pretty Adobe Buzzword. If the content is fixed, the context doesn't have to be.
A web-based office offers many advantages. For the company, it's the usual drill: the ability to sell the software as a service, putting adverts on the page and so on. For users, things are more complex.
The obvious benefit is access to files and tools from any net-connected PC. But as systems get more complicated, the files themselves open up. Instead of having to pay for and administer a server, having centralised access to files allows for instant collaboration online.
This could be as simple as allowing multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously or as specific as running a live presentation over the net.
Repository storage
The more niche the requirement, the more potential there is for a company to spring up and provide it. Current bandwidth and server costs make this a relatively cheap proposition, especially if they avoid the slap-on-some-ads business model in favour of charging up front.
Something that would offer a massive boost in this department is if the bigger companies that offer tools like Google Docs were to open up their storage systems as a repository for files and provide a basic selection of tools to play with while letting external sites hook into them, providing more specialised tools.
If this sounds like pie-in-the-sky thinking, it's not: it's more or less what Flickr does now. You save your photos on its service and use them as a gallery, and there's a built-in editing option powered by the third-party Picnik site. The API also lets any external app or website hook into what you've got and process it in new and interesting ways, whether it's feeding your photos into a different editor or ordering prints on Photobox.
The result is that people are much more likely to store their images on the site in the first place, and the wider ecosystem becomes a selling point. However, it's a difficult sell for companies. The era of portals and do-everything applications rewarded both data hoarding and user lock-in.
What we need is a world more akin to a toolbox, with smaller, more nimble companies trying to be a specific wrench instead of a 100-bit drill set. This is best personified by 37Signals, whose less-is-more approach to app creation gave the world Backpack, Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire, and put it high on the list of Web 2.0 companies that make their money by selling tools that people want instead of begging venture capitalists for cash and hoping that the ad market doesn't crash. And that's really not a bad place to be, given the current financial situation…
OpenOffice.org is easily the biggest name in the world of free office suites – and for a good reason. Version 3 doesn't add any new applications to the mix, though, serving up the standard mix of text editing, presentation creation, spreadsheets, drawing and basic database tools.
While it doesn't add much in the way of radical new features, Version 3 does make the existing features more capable. Calc is no longer restricted to 256 columns, while Writer can open up Office 2007 files (albeit in read-only format for the moment, making it a glorified viewer rather than a proper editing tool). It's still a bit of a sloth, though, and like previous versions, it's firmly geared towards replacing Office rather than surpassing it in terms of style or features.
There's really not enough here to warrant a new full version number, but never mind. OpenOffice.org remains an excellent package, and it's easily up there with Firefox as an example of the power of opensource development at its finest.
2. Google Docs
Nobody is ever going to be blown away by Docs' feature-set. The suite contains a bargain-basement word processor that feels like you're writing a blog post, an OK-ish spreadsheet that's fine for the weekly shopping, and forms and presentation creators that are so mediocre, we almost forgot to mention them just then.
For what they are, they're fine – but what they really are is one of a million side projects of a giant company that already has too much on its plate. Put Docs up against any of the free alternatives – never mind the downloadable options available – and it's a poor showing.
If Google wants Microsoft to take it seriously as a contender, it's time to splash out some cash and buy in some technology that feels ready for proper lifting. When you can't even tell how many pages one of your documents is or see how it sits on the page without actually hitting the Print button, you know that you're using a tool that's shooting for the moon and falling short somewhere near Luton. This is a very depressing offering.
3. Zoho Office
Zoho is the office suite that you'd expect to see if Google got out of the search and advertising business and just focused on applications.
Its free collection spans everything from online chatting to project management and invoicing, and there are some interesting high-end features such as only allowing access from certain IP ranges.
The tools often feel a bit rough and ready, but they're fairly powerful. The word processor module offers a solid range of tools for creating documents, while the Notebook offers an interesting OneNote-style method for keeping track of everything.
There's not much in the way of design consistency between the different applications, though, and the number of them on offer does smack of the 'kitchen sink' approach to features.
A cynic might cough and point suspiciously at one of the company's biggest features, the Zoho Web Application Creator, which has a business licensing plan and everything. Luckily, we are not cynics. Honest.
4. Thinkfree
Thinkfree is an unusual hybrid. It's an online suite, but it's Java-based. Log in and you can run the applet in a window or download a copy to your PC for future convenience. This means that there's an initial wait when you first open a document, but future loads are pretty quick. The result is a web-based editor that looks much like Office 2003, right down to the blue hue.
Documents are split into four categories: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and notes – the latter in beta, and still in need of work, the others working reasonably well. Because it's a downloadable application, Thinkfree has the ability to be much more familiar than the web alternatives that try to bend HTML into a usable form, and its online service means that it still has all the benefits of a cloud-based suite.
The online service kicks in for background functions, such as syncing files between devices, creating projects and emailing people working on a particular document when any changes are made.
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