Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:19 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much? by vasvir
Parent article: Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

1) It runs in the browser [...]

The problems with Google Docs become apparent when you have a slow or unreliable network connection. May not matter for some use cases, but is a killer problem in many common ones, like writing on a laptop while travelling.

In my opinion, is is not really a competitor to classic office suites.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:11 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

Are you sure you've actually enabled offline editing? Yes, there are some glitches, but Google Docs DO work offline!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:28 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I love when I get disconnected and it tells me to enable it next time…without telling me where or how (or it seems to hide when I get back online, I don't know). Not going to bother watching the video because I really dislike working in the thing anyways; rather just copy the text into vim and put it back later since it tends to break in a Vim-binding'd browser anyways. Yeah, I know the Google Docs team probably doesn't care about my use case(s).

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:50 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

Are you sure you've actually enabled offline editing?

No. Actually have not used Google docs for some time, precisely because of the network issue I mentioned. Besides, according to the page you linked to, the offline feature works only with the Chrome browser, which I don't use. This requirement gives it an unpleasant whiff of lock-in.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 6:01 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

The question was whether Google Docs is a competitor to LibreOffice and MSOffice. People don't really care about vendor lock-in or else MSOffice would not have been a contendor.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 12:18 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Many users (in addition F/OSS enthusiasts) are in fact beginning to care about lock-in, as witness the various initiatives around the world to require open document formats in public administration. I think it is a result of electronic documentation becoming mature. When the final archived version is no longer paper (which is universally readable by anyone with working eyes), the file format starts to matter a great deal.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 13:57 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Some of those initiatives didn't withstand the kind of small-minded, short-termism that pandered to Microsoft's OOXML standards-buying and lobbying, however. When public institutions with relatively generous budgets cannot be bothered to look beyond clicking "save" (ribbon or otherwise) in Microsoft Whatever, one can only imagine the kind of poverty they plead for their behaviour when budgets are actually reduced.

All these people now look to "the cloud" to solve all their document management problems, meaning that they now have another problem to deal with. Especially when Office 365 becomes Office 360, as has been known to happen. In short, there are lots of stupid/ignorant people who actually think lock-in is good, hard as it is for us to believe.