That is big. It could kill Google's prospects of getting Docs taken seriously by larger corporations.
Data ownership was always going to be a big sticking point for the cloud. In the end corps would probably have moved there simply by default (might have taken a while though).
But M$ will sell tons of this if they get the licensing right. For a corp it's like all the benefit of the cloud with none of the data ownership gotcha's. Superb maneouver.
It is a very smart move. But the cloud is really about getting your data away from your own networks, into better redundancy, downtime minimized and not having to pay for the upkeep.
It is a smart move since they are in the corporate space but companies that choose it maybe not so smart. Sounds like another way to bolt on Sharepoint which does alot of what office on the web does already (editing, revisions etc) and Sharepoint is extremely painful and unusable. Plus let's not forget Microsoft launched Live Meeting with some office tools to no fanfare at all.
It just makes me laugh a bit that some people think that keeping documents on their server is more "safe" when they are much easier to break into than Google and with most times very poor remote data backup procedures and tests.
I'll just make a prediction now that this Microsoft locally hosted office web will not gain much traction except in the Sharepoint world.
cloud is really about getting your data away from your own network
For startups and individuals, i.e. those that usually don’t have millions to spend on datacentre infrastructure, this is the case. However, large corporations like banks and multinationals can easily afford their own data centres at multiple locations around the globe, and so already have a solution for better redundancy and lower downtime. I think that the 'cloud' concept to them is about moving data from a fragmented set of desktops and file shares to an internal cloud rather than moving data off their network all together. This allows them to yield the benefits of the cloud (data consolidated, employee access from anywhere on their network, virtual workstations, easier distributed working) without the perceived disadvantages (data ownership and security). M$ have obviously realised this and made a shrewd move that makes use of their existing Office market share (they can claim ‘skill reuse’ when marketing the product and capitalise on the Office brand).
I agree Sharepoint is awful but the sad truth is that the senior managers that make these type of decisions barely use the software, will just see the feature list and trust a brand like M$ over the other solutions out there that work perfectly (and sometimes better) for the rest of us. This is just one of the reasons why enterprise software usually sucks.
Agreed, big international corporations don't need to worry about redundancy, they need to worry about losing the data at point A (the desktop) before it ever gets to point B (the data centre).
It would also allow a good go-between, in that a large corporation in the US could open a small branch for local development without huge overhead but still able to keep everything on your network.
I've always thought MS was especially talented at keeping corporations interested in them, which is really their real market. However its a tragedy that their home computing OS' are the spin off product. I believe that's been microsofts largest problem for the longest time, it's that Mr Consumer is well beyond second-class compared with Money-Bags LTD. At least with Apple the home consumer is treated as a valued customer, you don't have to buy the Ultimate-Professional-Elite-Edition at $1,000 a pop to get everything a techie needs.
> It just makes me laugh a bit that some people think that keeping documents on their server is more "safe" when they are much easier to break into than Google and with most times very poor remote data backup procedures and tests.
It's about accountability (believe me it's a pain). Google wont take responsibility for "problems" - down time for example - in the same way. If everything is in house and there is a break in or critical down time people can be blamed, scalped and so on.
In addition to safety from hackers, I would do it because it removes the risk of Google closing my account by mistake, causing me to loose all my data.
>> this...will not gain much traction except in the Sharepoint world.
OK - I would bet that's all MS is gunning for. If you're going to have the server capacity and administration skill set to manage a SharePoint system (which, from a user perspective, is pretty useful), then you'll have the capability to run this system; and you'll want to, because it will integrate perfectly with SharePoint and the rest of the Enterprise Office universe.
If you don't already run SharePoint, you probably wouldn't be able to manage Office Online anyways, from either a skills or a resource perspective. And I bet Microsoft is fine with this - they're just looking for a way to make SharePoint better and more invasive, which this will do. They're not looking at small businesses with this; small businesses don't care about data retention policies, and will just use Google Apps.
If you're small enough that you don't get worried about your data being stored on Google's servers, then you probably don't have an existing SharePoint infrastructure, and you probably don't have the resources to run this - so just go use Google Docs (or the hosted version of this). If you're large enough to care about where your data is, then you've probably got everything in place already you'd need to run Office Online, and you're who it's meant for.
>But the cloud is really about getting your data away from your own networks
Here's the thing I don't get:
If that were the case, then the best solution would be to write a native client that saves its data remotely over http. You get the best of both worlds.
1) Your data is centrally saved and managed
2) Your user interface isn't a crummy browser tab.
But thats not what anyone's doing. The use-case for all these web-based editors seems to be to let people use apps without having to install anything on the desktop. The fact that the documents are saved on the server is just an added bonus.
If its optional? Encrypted? They can compete as well as anyone then. That is, if their stuff stops sucking. There's no reason to think thats impossible.
I'm pretty sure Google gave up on its online office offerings as discrete apps.
I think WAVE was their move. It has formatting tools on par with Docs and has a much more natural-for-our-time data model. (mixed content, sharing and collaboration supported as a matter of course, extensible for pulling from or publishing to any number of destinations, etc)
And as WAVE is federated, if Google's branded offering to business doesn't include a self-hosting option, someone else's will.
Customers would get more of the benefits of cloud computing if they didn't have to set up their own servers though. It'd be cool if a customer could, say, host the app within the customer's own AWS account.
Yeah, but it's well established that big companies will pay ten, a hundred, a thousand times more if it means they have 100% control over the software and data. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers who wouldn't have jobs if not for that fact.
"There are hundreds of thousands of programmers who wouldn't have jobs if not for that fact."
Not my experience. There would still be plenty of work for those hundreds of thousands of programmers.
The reason that most companies have programmers is not because the want 100% control over the software and data. It's because they have no choice. They can't find pre-packaged software that perfectly supports their business rules.
Moving their apps to the cloud does nothing to change the way they run their business. They'll still need the same programmers to support that.
the trouble is in large (very large) companies anything not directly inside the control of the company inspires cold sweat and shakes from management types :)
"...anything not directly inside the control of the company inspires cold sweat and shakes from management types..."
Along with shareholders, creditors, vendors, customers, auditors, employees, directors, SOX compliance, SEC compliance, hell anyone with a vested interest or fiduciary responsibility.
yeh your right. My fault i should have highlighted the idea of intellectual property. Company payrolls are not as critical (in this respect) as the latest word document detailing the spec for the next greatest consumer product.
Companies will use outside tech when and if they are forced too. If it can come in house or they have a choice then voila :) If offered the choice between standard Office and Google docs the choice is clear for them - keep it on the premesis. However a self hosted version of Office-"Cloud" will appeal to those who see the value in cloud hosted apps (even if the whole point - reliability - is somewhat lost).
I really don't understand how Google Docs (GDocs) gets taken seriously as a competitor to Office. (And I'm depending on GDocs for my own strategic purpi.)
The formatting capabilities of GDocs are abysmal, not much better than a typewriter with a few fonts and four styles (paragraph, headers 1 through 3). Oh, and some poor table support.
Office Web will blow them away for serious document production needs.
Perhaps there are lots of non-serious document users out there, and perhaps GDocs serves them well. It's hard to know.
Agreed, yet if it wasn't for Google Docs then Office 2010 would be shipped solely as desktop software. Let's be thankful that MS takes the competition seriously.
Maybe, but Google Docs is nowhere near as mature as Office. Its main advantage is being web-based, which I'm not sure would translate well to an appliance.
The "appliance" term is used by Google to mean that the hardware lives with the company who's using it, but the users experience roughly the same thing they would if Google were hosting it.
It allows companies to keep all of their data stored on servers they own and control, while still using Google technology. A win for everyone, but it comes with a price tag.
One of the biggest advantages of Google's pure hosted play was that the backend is immune to piracy. Once MSFT opens this door, it can't be shut. MSFT has always had a love/hate relationship with piracy, fully knowing that they can use it to gain market share and struggle to monetize it later. To me, this move indicates they're willing to accept a little piracy in order to entrench the market.
A lot of the discussion here is assuming that MS have produced web apps that are as good or comparable to the Office desktop apps. It's not clear yet whether that's true.
The most recent thing I saw was a demo video in which they were talking about two web Excels, one in html and one in Silverlight which had more features.
Yes, I briefly messed around with an early build. It was fantastic. I won't say more as I haven't been following the publicity and so I don't know what is/isn't public info.
Data ownership was always going to be a big sticking point for the cloud. In the end corps would probably have moved there simply by default (might have taken a while though).
But M$ will sell tons of this if they get the licensing right. For a corp it's like all the benefit of the cloud with none of the data ownership gotcha's. Superb maneouver.
Google's move.