For me (not a student, not in the corporate world), the need for Office software can be virtually eliminated, and my guess is there’s millions of others like me. Companies like the ones on http://thesmallbusinessweb.com offer many solutions that are killing the typical office software.

Will

As I stated in my previous comments, I’ve been a longtime Google Docs user and have been writing about Zoho, ThinkFree, and Google Apps for a while now.

I am also a technical writer who sees MS Office issues on a daily basis and how template and document format issues can impact productivity.

Like it or not, many organizations are sitting on gigs upon gigs of Office documents and to fully or partially migrate to a Web Office suite then the factors I cite in my post should come into consideration so little or no time and productivity is lost.

Will

You bring up an interesting point about the introduction of OpenOffice.org. I used to work in a mixed OpenOffice.org/MS Office environment and we ran into some annoyances and outright issues with pagination and template styles. Some were just explained outright and some required tweaks to the template.

I’ve been following the whole open format question for awhile now. However, I’ve yet to see anybody offer up a simple solution for an organization to migrate gigs of Office documents to an open format in a low maintenance manner? Do you know of any such solution?

I wrote the original post using Google Docs (which I’ve been using since it was Writely). Google Docs is great for the average user but organizations sitting on large volumes of moderately complex Word documents should consider the points I cite in my post to be strategic in how they roll out a Web Office suite whether it be to their entire user community or the 80/20 rule Ray Stahl brings up in his previous comment.

While I didn’t come out and really say it in the post, I subscribe to the 80/20 rule and can see a day where more organizations are going to adopt such a model.

For businesses the 80-20 rule general applies in which the web apps office suites will address at least 80% of the business’s users and MS Office will be needed for the remaining 20% that require unique features very much like Visto is ration out today at most companies.

Just thought I should chime in. Gave me something to smile about as I work into the night

Like it or not, most of the world uses Office, so for an online office suite to succeed it will need to compete with Office for functionality and be 100% compatible with it.

There is no need to maintain documents in MS formats. Indeed, alternate formats and software offer superior compatibility (usually adhering to official open standards), and MS is among the worst at interoperability – probably intentionally so. Each alternative is not only fully self-compatible (your only expectation of MS), but offer users greater support for MS formats than MS offers for common ISO standards. So work groups using these alternatives will not encounter any internal issues.

While some users rely on advanced features of MS Office, this is a small minority, and the vast majority of users needs are fulfilled by web and other office suites. So 5% of users may “need” MS, but the other 95% would be better served by the alternatives.

You have noted potential limitations of web office suites in comparison to a local installation of MS office, but have not made the comparison of MS Office to an alternative locally installed office suite. OpenOffice is a more comparable product, and fully satisfies all of your points. WordPerfect Office is a viable alternative too, but less interoperable.

I agree that compatibility with prior documents saved in closed proprietary MS formats is the primary impediment to improvements in the marketplace. Yet consumers continue to needlessly perpetuate this expensive and detrimental status quo. Open format web suites are one of the best solutions to this problem.

In all seriousness there are factors that are far more important, such as reliability, scalability, trustiness and interoperability. The most important thing with online office-ware is what happens when you don’t have access to the Internet (ok, Gears and Thinkfree have that covered, I haven’t tested any other yet).

As for spell checking, silly Rabbit, you’ve got that in Firefox.

While you claim it’s not a Microsoft Office thing your post comes a bit like that.

In the end what matters is the final result, which is more likely to be either a PDF or some kind of static (ish) document.