Tag Archive for 'microsoft office'

Office productivity apps analysis

Published by Ben Kepes on July 18, 2008 in Business, Design, IT and SaaS. 2 Comments

Raju posted about an InfoWorld analysis of alternatives to MS office. What makes the analysis interesting is that for the first time (that I’ve seen) cloud based and Open Source products have been evaluated side by side.

infoworldreview

As is often the case with these sorts of analyses, it’s what is left unsaid that is arguably more important than what is said.

Some things I’d like mentioned or assessed to make a comparison more meaningful;

  • An analysis of the benefits to be gained from the cloud based nature of two of the offerings (ability to mine web data etc)
  • The release cycle of cloud based vs Open Source software
  • A comparison of all four offerings in relation to MS Office itself

The InfoWorld analysis looked at the main productivity (documents, spreadsheet and presentation) - it didn’t look at associated offerings from the same vendors (Zoho business, Google’s other offerings etc). As Raju pointed out in his post, if you look where the cloud based apps have come from in only a couple of years, it’s plain to see that their development velocity is far higher than the installed competitors - extrapolate that fact out for another few years and we’re sure to see cloud based apps streak ahead of the competitors - the one question that remains is what is Microsoft’s strategy around S+S for MS Office?

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Another word-esque development from Google docs

Published by Ben Kepes on May 10, 2008 in Design, IT and SaaS. 0 Comments

Announced today that Google docs now supports customisation of style sheets. This change opens up the templating and styling options that have always been available in word, but does so obviously in an easy to collaborate, available anywhere, in the clouds way.

See some examples over here. I have to say that the differences between the traditional office productivity offerings, and the on-demand ones, are narrowing rapidly (especially in the case of text editing). For all but the highest level users, the on-demand solutions should now fulfil all their requirements.

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