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LibreOffice as a service offers alternative to Google Docs, Office 365
- ucaetano 11y agoIt's a bit sad to see LibreOffice struggling to maintain relevance when the market it tried to address suddenly became [nearly nonexistent] irrelevant. It reminds me of all those hundreds of early 20th century battleships that suddenly became completely irrelevant when the Dreadnought came by. [Edit: replaced nearly nonexistent with irrelevant to make my point clearer]
- jacquesm 11y ago> It's a bit sad to see LibreOffice struggling to maintain relevance when the market it tried to address suddenly became nearly nonexistent. It works just fine for me and I'm not going anywhere for now so this little part of the 'market' will be around for a while. The ability to own and administer your files is severely under-rated.
- ucaetano 11y agoOh yes, there will always be a very small niche market for almost any piece of technology. Open source projects never die, they just linger forever on the edges of oblivion. > The ability to own and administer your files is severely under-rated. Or severely over-rated depending who you ask :)
- jacquesm 11y ago> Or severely over-rated depending who you ask :) Give it some time.
- coldtea 11y ago>It's a bit sad to see LibreOffice struggling to maintain relevance when the market it tried to address suddenly became nearly nonexistent. If you mean that we've moved from desktop office apps to cloud-based Office apps that's absolutely not true. The numbers I've seen for Google Docs etc are insignificant compared to office workers using MS Office and the rest. People who think Cloud docs have "won" apparently don't share the sames experiences with 99% of office workers in enterprise/businesses/governments etc. In startup-land and small web businesses yes, cloud docs do well, but those are insignificant numbers-wise to the millions upon millions of classic office workers. LibreOffice might be irrelevant, but that's because not many care for a free/open source office suite that's not MS Office, not because we've moved to Cloud documents.
- scholia 11y agoThis is true. However, the cloud is part of Office 365's ecosystem play. You get the full-strength Office programs installed locally (Windows and Mac), plus the ability to work in the cloud, plus the mobile apps for Windows, iOS and Android. Even if "99% of office workers in enterprise/businesses/governments etc" do their work on the desktop, there's still some appeal to being able to get what you want where you want it. This is where LibreOffice is trailing badly (as is Google Docs).
- workitout 11y ago>> there's still some appeal to being able to get what you want where you want it That implies most companies are willing to trust their business secrets to the cloud. That isn't what I see happening, not in medium sized business or enterprises.
- scholia 11y agoAgreed, up to a point. But a lot of companies are already using hosted email, and a lot have signed up for Office 365 and/or Google Docs.... https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-customer-stories-office-testimonials https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-custom... Quite a lot use salesforce.com and other services. It isn't the majority, but the cloud business is big and it's growing fast. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2974016/enterprise-applications/office-365-tops-salesforce-as-most-popular-enterprise-service.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2974016/enterprise-appl...
- ucaetano 11y agoDo you believe that will be the same 10 years from now? 15? It takes a lot of time to change an installed base, but that ship has sailed already.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoIn tech, all things old are new again every 10 years or so. You can't ever say "that ship has sailed."
- andrepd 11y ago>the market it tried to address suddenly became nearly nonexistent Can you give something to back the claim?
- ucaetano 11y agoI edited my post, my point was that the market for pure offline office productivity suites has become irrelevant, since the competition now is between a pure cloud-based service and a mix of offline and cloud based service :)
- RottenHuman 11y agoAnd why should LibreOffice not be able to integrate a "cloud service" into their suite? The extension interface of Libre Office even lets me think that this would be technically a triviality to integrate. Maybe with an open standard instead of a propriety and closed eco system, with the freedom to choose whom you trust with your data, or to host it yourself.
- ucaetano 11y agoOh, they can, no doubt about that. And that's what the post is about, trying to stay relevant in a changing market. But it adds a lot of complexity, since it switches from a product to a service.
- downtide 11y agoWhich market are you referring to? I still crave for a really nice word processor, spreadsheet, and easy database app (in the style of Access). I've always found *Office a bit rough around the edges. My partner recently brought home an iPad from work. Word failed to play well with other (MS Word) Office documents, so file exchange and formats are still a complete pain in the neck. I will be using plain text until something better comes along.
- scholia 11y ago>I will be using plain text until something better comes along. Didn't RTF coma along a couple of decades ago?
- downtide 11y agoI should rephrase that then. The plain text is very portable. And easier to edit and read than RTF. That's not to say that there aren't good RTF editors out there. Even HTML is more readable.
- scholia 11y agoDepends what you want to do. RTF can handle the presentation needs of most simple documents, and most word processors can edit RTF files, including WordPad and TextEdit. It's also very easy to convert RTF to plain text.....
- ucaetano 11y agoI think we can all agree that you're not representative of the market, and to be honest, I'd guess (with no data to back it up) that the majority of readers here aren't as well.
- downtide 11y agoI wouldn't say I was representative of the market. But I would like a good product. How do you define the market?
- RottenHuman 11y ago> replaced nearly nonexistent with irrelevant to make my point clearer I'm afraid your point is still not clear. What's your metric for declaring a market irrelevant? A conventional office suite is still the solution which is overwhelmingly dominating the market. Maybe look outside your own bubble and bias. A lot of business will never give away there confidential documents in the hands of third party cloud hosts. (which is the sane approach). So what's your criteria for calling that niche, irrelevant or even non-existent?
- ucaetano 11y agoWhen all the major players are switching to a different market. Sure, the installed base is still conventional office suites, but that's like saying that the car market is still gas-based even if all new cars sold are electrical (hypothetical situation). http://www.winbeta.org/news/office-365-overtakes-google-apps-in-business-market-triples-share-in-a-year http://www.winbeta.org/news/office-365-overtakes-google-apps... Bitglass also found that the share of companies using a cloud application for their productivity suite rose from 28% last year to 48% this year. Their report shows that Microsoft has successfully capitalized on the growth in cloud based productivity suite adoption rates to take the lead from Google.
- lucb1e 11y agoFrom the demo I saw, it worked as well as watching 1080p YouTube in a third world country. Someone figured it was smart to do server-side rendering and load your document as tiles using a technology designed for maps (the same as used in OpenStreetMap, and there it works well, because that's actually a map and not a document). The person argued WiFi was bad, but when typing on a 100mbps symmetric connection there was still a noticeable delay between my keystroke and it appearing on screen. Edit: to everyone saying they also can't watch YouTube 1080p without lag/buffering/whatever: perhaps it's not perfect anywhere outside the third world, but I could imagine that there it would suck even more. It's just a comparison, not a research paper.
- zelos 11y agoIt's pretty unpleasant to use for me too over an ordinary office internet connection: there's noticeable lag for simple UI actions, and there are image compression artefacts when things change quickly on screen.
- spdionis 11y ago> implying that watching youtube in 1080p is not easier in third world countries compared to first world... (looking at you Europe).
- creshal 11y agoWhy, it's really fast in Europe: "Sorry, this video is not available in your country" loads impressively efficiently.
- cubancigar11 11y agoYou are modded down but internet in India is faster AND cheaper than USA.
- bartvk 11y agoBut much less reliable, in my experience.
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- bobajeff 11y agoIt would be cool if they made a client side version of this using Emscripten.
- oever 11y agoIt's coming. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Emscripten https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Emscripten
- riccardom 11y agoDon't hold your breath, i think that emscripten port development is stalling.
- akie 11y agoNot sure how easy that would be. Emscripten converts C/C++ code to Javascript, but LibreOffice is written in Java. Theoretically it should be possible as Emscripten actually converts LLVM bytecode to Javascript, and you seem to be able to convert Java bytecode to LLVM bytecode, but Emscripten's [portability guidelines](http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/guidelines/portability_guidelines.html http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/guidel...) seem to say that you cannot compile multithreaded code, which I assume LibreOffice does use...
- zx2c4 11y agoLibreOffice is written in C++, actually. There are some small components written in Java, but they're optional, and you can run LibreOffice on a system that does not have Java.
- DiabloD3 11y agoTo those claiming that Office 365 somehow promotes web apps as your real apps... that isn't entirely true. My company (the one I started, hi) uses Office 365, and all three of us use Office 365's full office suite, the actual real desktop app one. What we use Office 365's cloud stuff for is their Exchange cluster (oh God, so delicious), and for OneDrive for Business (ie, what used to be Sharepoint). Browsers just aren't fast enough to handle web apps that large (not picking on Office 365's web apps, anything that big just sorta murders browsers), and I don't think they ever will be. This isn't something you can solve when your only tools are HTML, CSS, and JS.
- pidg 11y ago+1 for Office 365. I wasn't convinced until I actually started working at a company that uses it properly. The collaboration features in the native desktop apps work beautifully. Not having to endure emailed-round documents with multiple competing versions like "Report-Dec2015 Draft v5(FP,PL,KM) (2).doc" is worth the price of entry alone. I feel sorry for those like the UK government who've been successfully lobbied by The Document Foundation into using open standards, and are now locked in to using one vendor - Collabora - and their proprietary fork of LibreOffice.
- martin-adams 11y agoDocuments in emails for you to review is devastating. I have a client who keeps doing it. The first thing I do is download it, upload it to Google Docs and turn on Suggestion Editing. Collaborative cloud based document editing is such a life saver.
- rullelito 11y agoI can't stand LibreOffice, it's so slow compared to Office. So I don't have high hopes for this thing.
- workitout 11y agoI use both, how is LibreOffice slow?
- stephenr 11y agoIs there still not a reasonable quality, open-source browser based 'office' app? Open Document is all XML right, so it's not like a browser can't read/write the format because its some binary blob..
- oever 11y agoThere is WebODF, which is 100% pure client-side JavaScript. http://webodf.org/ http://webodf.org/ http://webodf.org/demo/ http://webodf.org/demo/
- stephenr 11y agoLooks nice, it's a shame it's AGPL though. Seriously, multiple down votes? I didn't even get to mentioning toe-jam.
- pascalmemories 11y agoI never knew about this until now. That looks pretty amazing and I can see all sorts of potential. There's all sorts of debate above about office 365 (some reads more like slick advertising astro-turf - people really shouldn't bite at that stuff) but this could be great for many web based business automation apps. I can think of a few things I've done in the past this would have been great for. I see it's already being built in to Zafara and Roundcube.
- niutech 11y agoThere is also ONLYOFFICE: http://onlyoffice.org http://onlyoffice.org
- sprin 11y agoEtherpad (http://etherpad.org http://etherpad.org) is an OSS cloud document editor app. It has a pretty reasonable set of formatting, revision, and import/export options out of the box, and also a large set of plugins (http://static.etherpad.org/plugins.html http://static.etherpad.org/plugins.html). Supported import formats are plain, doc, docx, odt, rtf, and html. There's a demo on the homepage that runs on Sandstorm.io, so you can very easily self-host or use managed hosting via the Sandstorm framework (https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io). EtherCalc (https://ethercalc.net/ https://ethercalc.net/, not related to Etherpad) is an OSS cloud spreadsheet app. Demo on homepage, also available on Sandstorm. Sandstorm has several other office/productivity apps, and in my opinion, is the clearest route to an effective OSS cloud office suite. I am hopeful for LO Online, but tile-based rendering seems like a bad choice. I have no doubt it will be packaged for Sandstorm at some point, but Etherpad is looking much better as of now.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoAs a Linux user, I really like the web versions of the Office365 apps. The functionality is good for situations when I need to work with other people's documents and not taking up disk space for installed apps is a fine feature for the new world of SSD storage on laptops. I also find Google docs handy to use, even though I use markdown stored in the cloud for writing my own content, managing research notes, etc. I like the idea of being able to self host cloud services but ownCloud and LibreOffice face stiff functionality competition.
- unixhero 11y agoBesides dude. Referring to poor countries as belonging to the third world implies that a second world exist. The second world collapsed with the Soviet Union and does not exist any longer. The preferred nomenclature is developing countries.
- noja 11y agoYes. The Nth World countries name comes from NATO: third world are unaligned, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
- function_seven 11y ago> The preferred nomenclature is developing countries. This term has always reeked of over-euphamism to me. I'm not arguing that "third-world" is any better, but what do I call countries that aren't developing? Right now, "developing countries" is used both to refer to countries that are actually developing (Kenya, for example) and as a polite way of saying "poor countries" (e.g. Somalia). Seems like we should have a term that doesn't confuse the two. When I hear "developing countries", I mentally substitute an image of the most impoverished areas of our world. Sorry if off-topic...
- paublyrne 11y agoYou can use LDC if you prefer (Lesser Developed Countries.).'The Global South' is often used in economics circles. There's no term that is wholly satisfactory.
- lentil_soup 11y agoalso, "developing countries" tries to establish an absolute rank and a division between countries. What are you taking into account when you say "developed", money? health? happiness? depending on what you use you'll get way different groups of countries
- unixhero 11y agoI would be happy to deep dive on this one, as I several of my 1000-level poltical science courses covered what we think of and how we classify and rank countries. The most basic thought is to begin at the lowest common denominator. What is it that all countries will agree to when placed into comparison. That is the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). It contains Life expectancy at birth. Education index: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of schooling. A decent standard of living: GNI per capita (PPP US$). Now from here you could rank GROSS DOMESTIC HAPPINESS, but that is a garbage index if you ask me as a political scientist and a champion of the free world. The top grossing country on that list is a country that imprisons and tortures. But I gather it makes sense to triangulate the facts from the CIA World Factbook, Heritage Foundation Freedom Index which covers press freedom and the extent of freedom of speech, and a sprinkle of transparency thus the Corruptions Perception Index from Transparency International. Now whether you're east thinking or west thinking you might also want to include another sprinkle of Amnesty International and quantify or qualitatively add its reportings to the mix. What you will find that the initial HDI gives a pretty darn clear and precise estimate of where you would want to live and where in the world could be deemed as "developing" as in not yet reached the top-end of the list. This is a scientific endavour, and it is not meant to hurt anybody's feelings. Also: You can downvote me or upvote me as much as you want. This is how the real world approached this problem.
- kriro 11y agoIn principal I like this idea a lot. Office as a Service but in freer...sign me up. As an aside I use LO as sort of a middleware for document conversion via PyOO (start headless LO, convert/load/creat documents etc. via Python script). I think UNO is rather complicated to use at least I struggle everytime I try to read the documentation (possible that I'm too dumb). I hope LO as a service helps make this use case more interesting and thus leads to more documentation and PyOO like libraries. I feel like there's some potential to get LO into more widespread use by improving/advertising the "headless LO" more. Oh I'm building this webservice...yeah sure upload your files as Excel or Calcs...we can use that and create nice Calc documents from either one. Powered by LO.
- riccardom 11y agoIf you are interested in document conversion using LO and python you can give it a try to https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit which is a python cffi wrapper for the stable api of LibreOfficeKit.
- sandGorgon 11y agoThis is wasted effort IMHO. The killer app of Office is Excel and NOTHING has come close to replacing it. In India, almost all laptop manufacturers give the option of preloaded Ubuntu. Yet people choose to pay for Windows - for either Excel or Photoshop. I would pay a large sum of money for a compatible spreadsheet. It is well worth doing a startup around. Everything else - Word or PowerPoint already has reasonable substitutes. Even if it is as simple as a PDF doc. But there is no substitute for Excel.
- huskyr 11y agoGoogle Sheets is quite pleasant to use, and sometimes i even prefer it over Excel. For larger data sets, it's lacking though.
- enobrev 11y agoI would pay full price for native adobe tools on ubuntu - especially now with the subscription pricing. My excel needs aren't as big and have mostly been covered by sheets in google docs. But that's personal need; I absolutely agree that excel is a beast. I've seen some amazing things put together by teams of "non-programmers" (in the professional sense) on excel.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- unixhero 11y agoAlthough you're not wrong. Excel is the killer app. Word is ALSO the killer app for heavy lifting writing papers etc. It's the program I suffered the least in during my uni years, and I tried them ___ALL___. As an investment analyst for VC, I also need to make A LOT of powerpoint presentations. Not a lot of slides, but I need to convey complex points in a short amount of slides. This makes me push Powerpoint to its limits and it also comes with no REAL competition elsewhere, I've tried __every alternative__. Nothing comes close to the robustness of MS Office, unfortunately.
- sandGorgon 11y agoHmm interesting. I have had people switch over to keynote. What do you think about that?
- rwmj 11y agoMy company did this back in 2000 using StarOffice which was the precursor to LibreOffice (via OpenOffice). Some screenshots[1]. What's interesting is that the numbers don't add up - it's hard to make a profit even at high subscription rates when you have to pay for all the hardware involved. Anyway, I hope they know what they're doing. [1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content
- davidgerard 11y agoPrevious news reports posit this work as part of Collabora's deal with .gov.uk. The thing they're offering up is a downloadable VM for you to play with. Something you could actually set up an in-office version of; something that people can use and report bugs on.
- niutech 11y agoThere are already WebODF (http://www.webodf.org http://www.webodf.org), used in ownCloud Documents, and OnlyOffice (http://onlyoffice.org http://onlyoffice.org)
- moonbug 11y agoAnd I thought it couldn't be possible to make LO any more infuriating to use. Well done guys, trebles all round.
- hunvreus 11y agoI quit using Microsoft Office over a decade ago. The last few years, I relied on LibreOffice but couldn't stand the regular crashes, bugs and overall frustrating user experience. I gave Google Docs another go and I must say I was surprised at how much better it was from 3 or 4 years ago. It was good enough for me to consider using Google Drive; me and my team are now using it for everything and couldn't be happier. We actually ditched Dropbox in the process. Box, Dropbox, Microsoft and other players in this segment of enterprise productivity software should be worried. I'm happy to pay for it and wouldn't run a company without it. I think a LibreOffice SaaS would have a hard time competing on features with Google Docs, let alone price.