PlexNex

Online-Offline Office

The Web 2.0 | Office 2.0 word-processor that does the fundamentals right, and also makes the online-offline experience very seamless, will take most of the pie...

"If online services that do not work offline go down — for maintenance or whatever reason — the outage should be considered as a detriment, not a growing pain."

MJ Foley | All About Microsoft (Aug 23, 2007)

Mary Jo has it sideways: it's not about being down, per se; it's about moving in & out of range of the access point -- a much more frequent occurrence. The ubiquity of wifi is a myth and seamless intercourse between environments and data when connected and dis-connected will make and break the Office 2.0 aspirant. 

If offline scenarios are not a core part of your dev roadmap and not factored in your buz model, go home now!

OpenOffice.org Doesn't Make the Cut

Web Worker Daily has a list of 10 minimalist word-processors for your basic productivity needs.

Conspicuously -- and appropriately -- OpenOffice isn't on the list. That's because OpenOffice evolved from way back in the 1980's as a direct competitor of MS Office, which is how it got so bloated. Add to this the fact that Sun has never run OpenOffice.org as an open source project and you have a 1997-era code-set too big and cumbersome to address present requirements.

OpenOffice will live an die by its proximity to MS Office's feature-set, and sadly it didn't get close enough in time to stop the native format it spawned, ODF, from becoming more important than the application. Apart from OpenOffice's utility as a negotiating chip for Sun, IBM, Novell and others against Microsoft, it's one of the great missed opportunities in software history...another of Sun's business blunders on the order of several hundred million Euros.

Long live the minimalist, web-ready, word-processors!

Steve Gillmor is Authoritative

I really like reading Steve. His new-ish blog is GestureLab. Here's a quote from his coverage of the Office 2.0 conference.

Not that folks like Doc Searls aren't frozen like some prehistoric dog in Eudora, or that most coprorates are chained in Notes or Exchange. But every new layoff or M&A triggers counter-accounts in Gmail.

Please read this. In it, you can feel how Google is charging like a mad rhino -- while saying absolutely nothing.