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Oh yeah, there will always be a place. But that's not what really matters, but the size of that place. Cloud-based productivity systems can replace native apps

Oh yeah, there will always be a place. But that's not what really matters, but the size of that place. Cloud-based productivity systems can replace native apps for over 90% of all corporate functions (marketing, HR, sales, etc.). Sure, you'll still need native systems for a few heavy functions (finance will keep on using excel for quite a while), but most of the use cases don't need a full-sized productivity suite.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
You could just as easily use a lightweight native productivity suite. None of the arguments you're making imply web-based solutions in of themselves.
- ucaetano 11y ago
  I'm not implying the web-based solutions are the only which will exist in the productivity suite market. But they are where the mass market is moving to. Native suites will still exist in niche cases, but they will have a very hard time competing with lightweight, low-overhead web-based suites.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >I'm not implying the web-based solutions are the only which will exist in the productivity suite market. But they are where the mass market is moving to. Any actual evidence for this in the Office suite space? Because I don't see it happening at all. It was an empty promise of 5-6 years ago, same as "Year of the Linux desktop" never came to be. For mail and collaboration (Slack, Jira, Asana etc), sure, web solutions will prevail. After all those things are all about the social, collaborative features the web brings to the table.
coldtea 11y ago
>Oh yeah, there will always be a place. But that's not what really matters, but the size of that place. Cloud-based productivity systems can replace native apps for over 90% of all corporate functions (marketing, HR, sales, etc.). Or that's what those that built them think. Then they found out performance and latency make it a non starter, and those "10% of features" that people use from Word, Powerpoint etc, are not the same 10% of everybody, so minimal web based replacements wont cut it.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  I haven't used a desktop document or spreadsheet in years. The argument that a couple of missing features, or ones that are somewhat sluggish over a bad network connection, will prevent widespread adoption of cloud-based products is completely ignoring the huge benefits of cloud-based systems. In short: Calling Google docs a "non-starter" seems like a difficult position to defend. It's already in use by millions of people, daily, and growth is high. There are plenty of folks, including businesses, who have opted not to install MS Office and instead use Docs for everything. Sure, there are plenty of situations where that doesn't work, but as the "web as a platform" advances, and as office products on the web advance, the reasons for sticking with installed apps will continue to decline. There will continue to be need for installed applications for heavy users for a long time to come (nobody is suggesting serious video or audio editing online, yet, but image editing is already reasonably do-able). Text-based and number-based documents? Those are easy. The very first personal computers could do them pretty well (Visicalc and WordStar, among others), and the web as a platform is vastly more powerful than the Apple II, C64, or IBM PC, that ran those products. And, they're also very easy to work on over very slow connections; you download the whole doc and check in changes in the background. Effectively making all the work happen on the client-side. No big deal.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jfim 11y ago
    It's a non starter in many use cases. There's no support for ODBC so you can't connect your spreadsheet to the internal BI servers, conditional formatting is really weak in Google sheets (no data bars, etc.), you can't have spreadsheets that refer to other spreadsheets, docs has awful formatting options, etc. It's just the same thing as comparing nano to emacs/vim. Sure, they both superficially edit text, but that's where the comparison ends.
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      OK, so it's not competitive for some use cases today. Nothing prevents implementation of any of those features, or an evolution away from needing those specific features and replacing them with other features. You mention ODBC, which is a cool feature for some folks, but desktop spreadsheets can't readily hook up to a form on the web, which Google docs can. There are powerful new functionalities provided by web-based apps, and in many cases, those new functionalities trump the old ones. To argue that what is true today will remain true effectively forever is to ignore the entire history of computing. Desktop applications won't win in the end. Every time a credible web-based alternative has arisen, it has won and destroyed the old way of doing things. So much so that we forget old ways even existed. In a decade I'll be surprised if there is still a desktop version of Office even still in development. There will be web-based versions that work without Internet access, but there won't be a version you "install" on your client machine. I'd bet it'll be sooner for most people, but there will remain outliers for several years beyond which there is a good business case for sticking with Office installed on each users machine.
bkor 11y ago
What's your experience based upon? Sales and marketing are often heavy Excel users from what I've seen. Even with the uptake of Salesforce (seems to be used more and more), you still have lots of Excel users. HR is usually a tiny bit of the company so I don't really find that interesting. I mostly see a mix of things at best.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

You could just as easily use a lightweight native productivity suite. None of the arguments you're making imply web-based solutions in of themselves.

ucaetano 11y ago
I'm not implying the web-based solutions are the only which will exist in the productivity suite market. But they are where the mass market is moving to. Native suites will still exist in niche cases, but they will have a very hard time competing with lightweight, low-overhead web-based suites.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I'm not implying the web-based solutions are the only which will exist in the productivity suite market. But they are where the mass market is moving to. Any actual evidence for this in the Office suite space? Because I don't see it happening at all. It was an empty promise of 5-6 years ago, same as "Year of the Linux desktop" never came to be. For mail and collaboration (Slack, Jira, Asana etc), sure, web solutions will prevail. After all those things are all about the social, collaborative features the web brings to the table.

coldtea 11y ago

>Oh yeah, there will always be a place. But that's not what really matters, but the size of that place. Cloud-based productivity systems can replace native apps for over 90% of all corporate functions (marketing, HR, sales, etc.). Or that's what those that built them think. Then they found out performance and latency make it a non starter, and those "10% of features" that people use from Word, Powerpoint etc, are not the same 10% of everybody, so minimal web based replacements wont cut it.

SwellJoe 11y ago
I haven't used a desktop document or spreadsheet in years. The argument that a couple of missing features, or ones that are somewhat sluggish over a bad network connection, will prevent widespread adoption of cloud-based products is completely ignoring the huge benefits of cloud-based systems. In short: Calling Google docs a "non-starter" seems like a difficult position to defend. It's already in use by millions of people, daily, and growth is high. There are plenty of folks, including businesses, who have opted not to install MS Office and instead use Docs for everything. Sure, there are plenty of situations where that doesn't work, but as the "web as a platform" advances, and as office products on the web advance, the reasons for sticking with installed apps will continue to decline. There will continue to be need for installed applications for heavy users for a long time to come (nobody is suggesting serious video or audio editing online, yet, but image editing is already reasonably do-able). Text-based and number-based documents? Those are easy. The very first personal computers could do them pretty well (Visicalc and WordStar, among others), and the web as a platform is vastly more powerful than the Apple II, C64, or IBM PC, that ran those products. And, they're also very easy to work on over very slow connections; you download the whole doc and check in changes in the background. Effectively making all the work happen on the client-side. No big deal.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jfim 11y ago
  It's a non starter in many use cases. There's no support for ODBC so you can't connect your spreadsheet to the internal BI servers, conditional formatting is really weak in Google sheets (no data bars, etc.), you can't have spreadsheets that refer to other spreadsheets, docs has awful formatting options, etc. It's just the same thing as comparing nano to emacs/vim. Sure, they both superficially edit text, but that's where the comparison ends.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    OK, so it's not competitive for some use cases today. Nothing prevents implementation of any of those features, or an evolution away from needing those specific features and replacing them with other features. You mention ODBC, which is a cool feature for some folks, but desktop spreadsheets can't readily hook up to a form on the web, which Google docs can. There are powerful new functionalities provided by web-based apps, and in many cases, those new functionalities trump the old ones. To argue that what is true today will remain true effectively forever is to ignore the entire history of computing. Desktop applications won't win in the end. Every time a credible web-based alternative has arisen, it has won and destroyed the old way of doing things. So much so that we forget old ways even existed. In a decade I'll be surprised if there is still a desktop version of Office even still in development. There will be web-based versions that work without Internet access, but there won't be a version you "install" on your client machine. I'd bet it'll be sooner for most people, but there will remain outliers for several years beyond which there is a good business case for sticking with Office installed on each users machine.

bkor 11y ago

What's your experience based upon? Sales and marketing are often heavy Excel users from what I've seen. Even with the uptake of Salesforce (seems to be used more and more), you still have lots of Excel users. HR is usually a tiny bit of the company so I don't really find that interesting. I mostly see a mix of things at best.