Online Office Suites
Ever feel like you might be in a dream? I have this recurring dream it’s the early 90’s and I’m testing out some shareware alternative to Microsoft Office.
It’s recurring because people keep trying to reinvent the wheel using a very rectangular block of concrete and no chisel.
There’s nothing wrong with the theory of online office suites. It all falls apart ridiculously fast when you realise the practical limitations a browser and web technologies adds to “software”.
Recently several fairly high profile blogs and news sources tried to hype a move by Google as some sort of invasion into Microsoft’s territory. The first thing you have to understand is manufactured hype is the bread-and-butter of blogs, without it they’d have no substance. A well thought-out spin can make the difference between a popular post and one that goes unheard.
The second thing you have to keep in mind is that Google, as a brand, is news. If Google farted the reverberations would be podcasted all over the internet. The smell would be preserved in plastic bags and auctioned on eBay.
So when Google mentions they’re going to complete their “office suite” (they already have an average word processor and an impressive-from-a-technical-viewpoint spreadsheet app) with a presentation app, it is of course big news.
Mashable, TechCrunch and even the respectable Sydney Morning Herald all ranked very high on my chucklemeter that day for their allegations that some web based toy was actually a viable competitor for MS Office.
“It looks like Google is set to take on Microsoft’s PowerPoint”, says Mashable. “ORLY” says Microsoft? “No”, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
TechCrunch believes the “we’re not competing with Microsoft Powerpoint” angle Schmidt played is “complete spin”.
SMH, in a somewhat late April Fools joke proclaimed “Free office tools, such as Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets and OpenOffice, are increasingly offering many of the core features of Microsoft’s cash-cow, and have established themselves as attractive alternatives for mainstream consumers.”
Only the last part, Open Office, could be described as an alternative.
The only one able to evaulate the situation rationally was GigaOm, who seems to have accepted the obvious truth that some html/javascript mess isn’t going to compete with a sophisticated, mature application like PowerPoint. c|net still scored a chuckle simply for bothering to quote the silly Microsoft Office spin at all.
What’s holding online office suites back
The short answer is the internet. The long answer is the internet, current web technologies and web browsers that have been locked down so tightly that key functionality simply cannot be fudged together.
The internet …
Imagine this hypothetical and virtually impossible scenario: I have a Word document, 20 pages, couple of photos in it. It’s about a megabyte. To manipulate that document using current online offerings I need to:
- be connected to the internet
- upload it, which means I need to be on a good connection
- manipulate it
- download it, again which is fine if I’m on a decent connection
There’s 3 very redundant steps there that can’t be overcome while online office suites are sitting in web browsers. Those steps alone are enough to ensure that adoptation will only be by “home users”.
During that process I’m also passing my document through umpteen servers, and almost certainly leaving a copy of it on the office suite’s servers as well. For my shopping list I don’t care, but if it’s my secret list of people I stalk, I’m leaving valuable evidence behind. Or more likely, private business information. But my stalking list analogy is cooler.
Connectivity is a bigger issue than people make out. There’s legions of people like me who don’t have some sort of magical always-on, always-available internet connection. Like when I’m sitting on a train or a plane.
Browsers as an environment
This argument never goes down well with people frothing at the mouth to embrace online versions of everything they do at any expense (other than money).
Web browsers are a crappy environment to develop applications in. I’ve said it. I’ve felt it for years, the last decade even, during which time I’ve been developing professionally using lots of different technologies, for lots of different companies. Some of them are big companies, and some of the works I’ve done could be described as “pretty big”.
I’ve done lots of stuff with all the certified-buzzwordish technologies. I’ve been using AJAX for years. Vanilla JavaScript for years before that. Flash, VBScript, HTML and CSS. As well as several serverside languages and a couple of database platforms.
Cross browser compatibility doesn’t scare me, neither do web standards. People who preach about the latter do scare me a little, but we all grow out of that as we get older.
Anyway. The web browser is a crap environment. I’m not just pulling that out of my ass, I’m pulling it out of my experienced ass.
The reason they (and I mean all of them) are crappy environments is simple – the need for security has outweighed the need for features. This isn’t really anyone’s fault, it was a sound decision to provide strict limitations for what a browser can and can’t do.
I don’t really want Internet Explorer letting some website manipulate my files locally, or Firefox or Opera or any other browser. But let’s face it – local file interaction is necessary for applications that work with your files.
Other horrible limitations include the Tab key. Browsers already have assigned functions to the Tab key, as well as F1 (commonly used for help in Windows applications), the mouse context menu (yeah it can be fudged around with JS but I for one want an environment I don’t have to work around).
Even the Home/End/Page Up/Page Down keys and the mouse scroll wheel can be troublesome if there’s multiple scrollable elements on the page.
The technologies are crippling
Take this with a grain of salt, or not at all, or whatever. Whether you believe it or not, current web technologies suck. JavaScript, (x)HTML and CSS have their own unique limitations that acerbate the browser and connection problems further.
To start with, they’re old and inefficient. The “current” iterations of those langauges are approaching their 10th birthdays. Ten years of technological changes, progressions and changing requirements have been neatly ignored by the W3C. But it’s alright, because their recommendations were neatly ignored or interpreted in convenient fashions by browser vendors anyway.
So what we have is nearly ten year old language versions with poor implementations in new browsers. I don’t just mean Internet Explorer either.
Beyond the age and the implementations, there’s other limitations. Like with the darling technology of the internet, AJAX. There’s a great writeup of some of AJAX’s limitations here which includes some of the points I blame browsers for. But the single biggest problem with AJAX is that it’s one-way communication. I can only receive something if I request it. The server can’t say “Hey a new story just got posted, let me send you the info”, I have to say “hmm it’s been X seconds, let me check if a new story has been posted”.
Then you’ve got HTML and CSS, which are admittably alright and quite versatile, but with or without JavaScript, they cannot efficiently handle a truly rich interface without a performance cost.
Which brings me to performance. JavaScript-based applications are fast while they’re light. They become sluggish quite rapidly though when you’re dealing with large numbers of operations or data. To witness that all you need to do is access a JavaScript heavy site on a single-core, bog-ordinary PC. Like the ones most people use.
So what’s the point
There isn’t one. There is no point at all to producing JavaScript/HTML/CSS based office suites. There’s especially no point in comparing them to Microsoft, or pretending even for a second that Microsoft’s marketshare is threatened by these parodies.
A recent comparison of online office suites at ComputerWorld picked ThinkFree as the best out of 4 online suites they compared. And that’s with glowing praise like:
- “The downside: loading Write or Calc can take up to a minute, and saving a small file takes about 10 seconds.”
- “ThinkFree isn’t 100% compatible with Office.”
- “template and macro are concepts ThinkFree Write and Calc applications don’t understand.”
And that was the winner, and yes, Google Apps was a part of the competition too. These applications can’t even compete with the feature-rich and widely respected underdog Open Office.
Except on one ground – they’re web based. That doesn’t really mean much though. The chances of having no desktop-based office suite at school, home, work or even an internet cafe are pretty slim. You can even get MS Office on your cell phone these days.
Which begs the question … why do Google and the others bother? Anyone know?
