Online Software

Is online software the next big thing? Maybe it is.

Sure the big software companies will be rubbing their hands with glee over the prospect of more easy money to be made but the impact may be much further ranging - and not quite what those companies expect. For the Linux and Open Source communities this will be a big step in trying to convince users to switch to 'free' products. Imagine a user who doesn't want to use OpenOffice becuase he finds the idea of getting something free just too overwhelming - or he just doesn't trust it to be safe. Or perhaps he is worried that it won't do what his copy of MS Office does.. Online software can change that

Creating an online version of OpenOffice is not as hard as it sounds - depending on the technology you can use, the new Web2.0 standard *spit* creates a much more user friendly environment in the browser. Now you can use AJAX (a mix of advanced javascript, xml and php) to, for example, save a document whilst the user is still working on it.

As to file formats that is easy to. OO documents are saved using the fairly new Open Document standard - which is essentially just all of the data stored in XML format. Handily PHP5 pretty good XML handlers.

So it is possible to create a convincing online word editor thats saves documents in a standard that a fully featured offline word editor can open and use - so why have the OpenOffice team not done it yet?

Well I cn't say for sure, certainly when I suggested it they were very dismissing and seemed almost scared of the idea. Maybe it is because it is a new thing and they are not yet used to the idea, or maybe they are afraid it will detract from the actual OO software. Whatever the reason I think they are missing out on a BIG opportunity - I am sure if they developed OO-Online and released it inside 6 month's (which they could do) then it would be a big blow to MS and other software companies. It is not too often that a free Open SOurce alternative gets the chance to be one major step ahead of commercial competition in the way this could be.

Could they develop it in 6 months though? Well yes I think so. Built into the grand scheme of things for my LIVE! project is to have an online office suite based on OpenOffice, so I decided to look into the idea in more depth. As a result I think that I personally could develop and online version in 8 months - so for a team of developers 6 months is easy.

Regardless I have begun to play around with ideas for an online version, there is still at least 2 to 3 months of primary LIVE! development to do as yet so it wll be at least 12 months yet before I could release anything like a working copy of LIVE!OpenOffice (or more likely OpenOffice!Live). So it really is a shame that they wont do it themsleves...