Simon Barratt

Google Office

Just read that Google and Sun are teaming up to release Google Office, no doubt a rebranded version of Star Office.  This could be the nudge that Star Office needs to clear the final hurdle of mass acceptance!

Once again, Google are proving to be a major thorn in Microsoft's side!  In the same way Firefox got them to take browsers seriously again, this should cause some changes to their Office suite.  I know they have just announced version 12, but maybe this will force lower prices!

I expect it will be chock full of the current Internet darling: AJAX code.

On a similar note, I was exploring Writely's offering yesterday, which is an Internet word processor.  A nice slick (AJAX) application that allows multiple people to work on a documents together.  It allows you to invite anyone, via email, to collaborate on the document and keeps track of all the revisions (wiki style).  As a user, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds, which allow you to track changes in the active documents list, or (with a few hops) you can even subscribe to individual changes within a particular document.

These applications are cool, but at the moment are a bit disjointed.  Maybe someone the size of Google can integrate these features better.