4 ms·
Why do people think that MS needs "saving"? They have been predicting MS's death for, what 10 years now? And MS is still making money hand over fist, without an
by hernan7 19y ago
Why do people think that MS needs "saving"? They have been predicting MS's death for, what 10 years now? And MS is still making money hand over fist, without any signs of slowing down.
OK, maybe web apps are "where the future is" -- but so were the network computer and the Linux desktop. And, if anybody can make a ton of $$$ out of "yesterday's business plan", that's MS.
If anything, the anti-MS camp needs less hyperbole and more follow-through. "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk".
(BTW, I'm an old Unix hand, not a Windows fan at all.)
- jmzachary 19y agoProbably because if you believe that web apps are where the future is, then Microsoft's business model is severely screwed because they have no products that compete in that space, they don't control it (despite IE market share), and they have continuously demonstrated that they don't understand it. Maybe buying Yahoo is part of their attempt to kill the web app future. Maybe buying Yahoo is a brilliant move, not an act of desperation.
- mattmaroon 19y agoAs a frequent user of Office, I'm still far from sold on the idea of Google Docs being the future. Maybe the very distant future, but certainly nobody will be using it (or competitors) in 5 years, and unlikely any significant amount will be in 10. It's simply overextension of the modern mania for moving stuff to the web.
- cstejerean 19y agoGoogle Docs allowed me to complete the switch to Linux and Mac. I can easily exchange Word and PDF copies of my documents with email contacts, never have to worry about which partition my files happen to be on today, and better yet: access my documents from anywhere. I love the fact that Google can take documents from GMail and with one click open them in Google Docs. The ability to share and collaborate on documents is awesome as well. Emailing the same file over and over again to an entire mailing list and making sure not to loose revisions is a thing of the past. Turns out people like to communicate and collaborate and they like the convenience of having their files available everywhere. MS has failed to deliver in this area.
- tx 19y agoGoogle Docs is simply a web storage. The actual "office" part, specifically the text editing, is done by a rich text control embedded into your browser, which is written in C++ or plain C i.e. it is as much "web" as Office itself, only many times less powerful. Closest Windows desktop equivalent? The mighty WordPad circa 1994! You could have completed your Linux switch without Google Docs. AbiWord kicks GDocs' butt, as well as KWord, I am not even talking about Sun's junk. We tried to use Google docs and for anything more complex than 2-3 paragraphs of simple text it was inadequate. You can't even control line spacing for god's sake.
- cstejerean 19y agoMaybe it didn't work for you. I use it to manage my resume for example without a single problem. I can access it from anywhere, share it with people, track changes and email word or PDF copies. I haven't used a desktop word processor in the last year (unless I'm opening some file from a backup disk that I haven't had a chance to upload). And wordpad was a pretty decent editor. The problem is it couldn't open word files sent by others (so I always had to install Office or convert files to RTF). Turns out most word documents render just fine in RTF.
- cstejerean 19y agoI'm pretty certain the rich text control in Google Docs is not written in C/C++ and is not built into the browser. It's implemented in Javascript. Or are you saying the web browser is written in C/C++?