Will this result in the phrase "Death by Google", instead of "Death by powerpoint" .

And where's the Paris Hilton angle?

And im sure they'll guarantee the privacy of those documents! A glorified sharepoint server....

but a link to the beta page could help

on Page :

http://docs.google.com/?action=unsupported_browser&product=presentations

Quote:

Sorry, but this browser does not support web presentations.

We recommend you try Google Docs on:

* Mozilla Firefox: 1.5.0.12 or higher

* Mozilla SeaMonkey: 1.0 or higher

* Internet Explorer: 6.0 or higher

All of these are FREE and easy to download and use.

If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just add ?browserok=true to the end of the Google Docs url.

Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretenses, so don't let us catch you at it.

And, it won't work very well -- really.

These google people are so coooool :)

Well, maybe not their recruitment from what I've heard, but do you see hotmail(live whatever the name now is) having funny pages like that, and also I do not see hotmail (live.....) giving you the a simple bypass to browser check.

No flamable content here, and no troll to feed :)

For a company who recently espoused the benefits of the ODF over OOXML it seems rather surprising that the new Google Docs only supports PowerPoint presentations for upload, no ODF option for presentations at all. Bummer.

I'll come back when it's finished.

Druids = Celtic

Anu = Babylonian, Sumerian

And Anu was a bloke.

what does it do? I've looked at it, but it doesn't look like anything more than a web-page designer. I couldn't find any way to do animations, text effects, or insert sounds/videos or any of the other fancy stuff Powerpunt does. Just pics, text, and a few pre-defined background themes. Totally not impressive as a slide-show program.

am I the only one waiting to hear of a Sun/Google partnership to provide StarOffice as a SaaS offering?

I've been wondering, given Sun's Java technology and expertise, why they have brought a SaaS StarOffice offering to market by now ... Given the investment and evolution of StarOffice and its MS Office compatabilities it seems a great potential addition to the Google apps campaign.

annul nadrach uddvas bethud dochial d'emvae..

If you were planning to use the Celtic/Druidic theme, then perhaps - since there are three components to the Google apps - rather than the "another wheel to the wagon" reference, you might have been better-off saying that they were "adding the final leg to the triskele". The Celts were pretty heavily into triplets (vis. the Welsh bardic triads) and triskeles were, IIRC, a common artistic motif, while I'm not convinced that three-wheeled carts were particularly common.

(No IT angle, here... nope... none at all. Sorry.)

(Okay... I'm NOT really sorry.)

We certainly have a whole spectrum of reverse-engineered knock-offs of Microsoft Office. It would be nice if someone did something original. It's a sad fact that the most creative new office software is still MS Office. Their 2007 product had a lot of new ideas, some good, some not so good, but at least they are innovating.

People talk about Microsoft doing "Embrace and Extend". But everyone else seems to do "Daemonize but Duplicate". Trivially adapt their office formats, without doing any of the R&D that Microsoft did (e.g. ODF), then bash Microsoft and try to get governments to ban their format.

Not that I am an admirer of Microsoft's business tactics, but I don't buy the idea that Google or the open-source companies are altruistic.

It's not that simple. It's the QWERTY problem... the keyboard layout designed to make you type slower so that your typewriter won't jam. Once something like that becomes dominant, any innovation that is significantly different will not get any traction (e.g. much faster DVORAK layout).

So the only way to compete with a dominant technolgy is "the same, but better". In the case of Star Office, the "better" is in the areas of document compatability, price, and some aspects of usability (at least compared to pre-2007 MS office editions).

Star Office is a long established product - its roots are in a DOS wordprocessor called StarWriter - and as far as I can tell the ODF document format is a descendant of the StarWriter formats. I do think they must have re-done the format from scratch at some point, or otherwise ODF would have the same kind of backwards-compatability bloat that OOXML suffers from.

MH

P.S. Oddly enough ODF could not be as you put it "a trivial adaptation of MS office formats" because the latter are closed and proprietary - and *very* non-trivial to reverse-engineer. Where ODFs render perfectly in OpenOffice, there are still occasional rendering problems with Word documents - which shows pretty clearly that ODF is a parallel rather than derivative format.

Of course if we're talking about the underlying principles of document formats, *everyone* has been ripping off Xerox's work (the same goes for GUIs).

"I couldn't find any way to do animations, text effects, or insert sounds/videos or any of the other fancy stuff Powerpunt does."

Praise Anu then! :O)

So they are giving away Office apps, browsers, desktop apps and as rumours say, a complete OS.

Wonder when MS will have a valid case for an Antitrust case against Google?

QUOTE:

Sorry, but this browser does not support web presentations.

We recommend you try Google Docs on:

* Mozilla Firefox: 1.5.0.12 or higher

* Mozilla SeaMonkey: 1.0 or higher

* Internet Explorer: 6.0 or higher

All of these are FREE and easy to download and use.

UNQUOTE

Errr, my default browser is SeaMonkey 1.1.4 ... and I'm using it right now.

I always spoof my browser when using Seamonkey, keeps things like Scalix happy.

"So they are giving away Office apps, browsers, desktop apps and as rumours say, a complete OS."

Actually, considering that Google has massive dominance in the search market, I'll admit that I've been waiting for this issue to start gaining some attention. That having been said, I don't think they are in any danger yet. You see, they aren't really bundling anything here. They are riding on their brand name, yes. However, all of their services can be used independently of any others, and their downloads require you to go get them.

Contrast Microsoft, where if you use their dominant product (Windows), you automatically have several other products forced onto your system, whether you want them or not. No, Google is safe for the moment. We'll see how long that lasts, though.

-daniel

You make some good points, but it is not the case that the office formats are highly secret. There are plenty of applications that read and write these formats and interwork with MS Office. RTF is completely documented. The point is that MS Office is a blueprint for how to write an office software suite.

I was recently comparing the typography of a few products for a book I'm writing, so I tested Quark Xpress, Indesign, Word and I tried Open Office too. I was surprised when Open Office output exactly the same layout as MS Office. That certainly is reverse engineering, not a "parallel effort".

But I think competition is good. What I really was complaining about is the attitude that governments should step in to actually ban Microsoft Office formats. People hate MS so much they don't even want them to define an open format. That's ridiculous.

it is basically the old MS document formats in an XML wrapper. That proprietary content was one of the main reasons why the standards bodies sent Microsoft back to the drawing board.