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Gary Edwards

Why Microsoft Azure could have the last laugh in the cloud wars | CITEworld - 0 views

  • Venture capitalist Brad Feld recently wrote an interesting post predicting the end of Amazon's dominance of the cloud computing market, and concluded, "it’s suddenly a good time to be Microsoft or Google in the cloud computing wars." I'd go one step farther. Using Feld's arguments, I'd say that Microsoft is in the driver's seat. More like this The dark side of the cloud price wars between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft The rise, fall, and rehabilitation of Internet Explorer Microsoft, Apple, and Google battle for the mobile enterprise Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from Learn More First, the price war. Microsoft and Google are on approximately equal ground when it comes to cutting prices -- both have highly profitable core businesses that they can use to subsidize a price war in cloud infrastructure, even to the point of sustaining losses for a while to gain market share. Amazon does not. 
  • Second, the quality argument. Like Feld, we've also pointed out that there are niche cloud providers that do a better job than the big guys at providing infrastructure-as-a-service for specific verticals, but when you move all the way up the stack to full software-as-a-service applications, Microsoft has an edge among the big three with Office 365.
  • Google has been making inroads into smaller businesses with Google Apps for almost a decade now, Microsoft remains the standard in the biggest and most profitable business customers -- as this recent investigation from Dan Frommer at Quartz showed, only one company in the Fortune 50 uses Google Apps. (That company happens to be Google itself.) 
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  • The third argument, support, is mostly a wash. While Amazon's support may be terrible (I have no evidence of this, but I'm taking Feld's word for it), Microsoft and Google and their respective ecosystem partners do a decent job of supporting customers on their stacks.
  • But then comes the fourth argument. Feld points out that once companies get to $200,000 per month of cloud-infrastructure spend, it's actually significantly cheaper to build their own data centers
  • Microsoft is the only one of the big three players with an on-premise offering -- Windows Server and the rest of the Microsoft infrastructure family. Maybe the exact break-even point will change as the cloud price wars continue, but Microsoft has the most pieces customers would need to move from all-cloud to a hybrid or on-premise solution. Or, for that matter, for existing on-premise customers to begin experimenting moving some workloads to the cloud.
  • There's one more point favoring Microsoft. Google's core business is selling online advertising. That business makes up about 90% of Google's revenue, and it has enviably high operating margins -- around 30%, based on Google's 2011 financial report. (I picked 2011 because that was before Google bought Motorola Mobility, which changed the margin structure.)
  • It's unclear how the Google Cloud Platform helps that business. Are customers using Google's Cloud somehow more likely to advertise with Google? I don't see it. Are Google advertising customers demanding to run other workloads on Google technology? I don't see it.
  • Meanwhile, while Azure almost certainly offers lower margins than, say, on-premises Windows Servers, it's necessary -- customers are moving workloads to the cloud, and Microsoft needs a competitive offering there to keep them on the Microsoft stack so they continue to buy other Microsoft products. Plus, as I argued in point four, today's Azure customers could become tomorrow's on-premise Microsoft infrastructure customers.
  • In other words, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Engine both lower the profit margins of their parent companies. But Azure is clearly strategic while Cloud Engine, as far as I can tell, is not. Who's more likely to keep investing in and improving its Cloud? 
  • right now, Microsoft's chances look pretty good to me. No wonder they put the cloud guy in charge of the company.
Gary Edwards

Open XML blogging in 2007 - Doug Mahugh - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - 0 views

  •  
    At the height of the Document Wars, Doug Mahugh posted this year end, month to month, blow by blow list of blog assaults. I stumbled upon Doug's collection following up on a recent (December 20th, 2010) eMail comment from Karl.  Karl had been reading the infamous "Hypocrisy 101" blog written by Jesper Lundstocholm:  http://bit.ly/hgCVLV Recently i was researching cloud-computing, following the USA Federal Government dictate that cloud-computing initiatives should get top priority first-consideration for all government agency purchases.  The market is worth about $8 Billion, with Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps totally dominating contract decisions in the early going.  The loser looks to be IBM Lotus Notes since they seem to have held most of systems contracts. So what does this have to do with Hypocrisy 101? To stop Microsoft BPOS, IBM had to get a government mandate for ODF and NOT OOXML.  The reason is now clear.  Microsoft BPOS is dominating the early rounds of government cloud-computing contracts because BPOS is "compatible" with the legacy MSOffice desktop productivity environment.  Lotus symphony is not.  Nor is OpenOffice or any other ODF Office Suite.   This compatibility between BPOS and legacy MSOffice productivity environments means less disruption and re engineering of business process costs as governments make the generational shift from desktop "client/server" productivity to a Web productivity platform - otherwise known as "cloud-computing". IMHO, neither ODF or OOXML were designed for this cloud-computing :: Web productivity platform future.  The "Web" aspect of cloud-computing means that HTML-HTTP-JavaScript technologies will prevail in this new world of cloud-computing.  It's difficult, but not impossible, to convert ODF and OOXML to HTML+ (HTML5, CSS3, Canvas/SVG, JavaScript).  This broad difficulty means that cloud-computing does not have a highly compatible productivity authoring environment designed to meet the transition needs
Gary Edwards

Just how much bigger AWS is compared its next competitor may surprise you | Network World - 0 views

  • For reference, Microsoft's latest quarterly earnings statement does not break out revenue for Azure specifically, and it breaks up revenue for its different cloud products into different commercial and licensing categories. One of those categories, the commercial division had cloud services revenue that doubled in the quarter, growing $367 million, mainly from Office 365 commercial sales.
  • Brandon Butler — Senior Writer Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups. He contributes to NetworkWorld.com and is the author of the cloud Chronicles blog
  • Email him at bbutler@nww.com
  •  
    "Amazon.com came out with its quarterly earnings last week and Technology Business Research analyst Jillian Mirandi crunched the numbers of how much of a lead AWS has on its competitors in the public cloud market. The numbers are striking. AWS broke $1.1 billion in quarterly revenues for cloud IaaS in the first quarter of 2014. The company's next closest competitor in the cloud IaaS market, IBM, came in at $350 million. That's almost a three-fold lead for AWS compared to the nearest competitor, according to TBR. Behind IBM, Microsoft and Google close out the top four public cloud IaaS providers, but those latter two companies only generated about $30 million in cloud IaaS revenue last quarter, TBR estimates."
Gary Edwards

Dump the file server: Why we moved to the SharePoint Online cloud [review] - 0 views

  • For this article, I wanted to focus on an important aspect of our move to Office 365, and that was our adoption of SharePoint Online as our sole document file server. I know, how passé for me to call it a file server as it represents everything that fixes what plagues traditional file servers and NASes. Let's face it: file servers have been a necessary evil, not a nicety that have enabled collaboration and seamless access to data. They offer superior security and storage space, but this comes at the price of external access and coauthoring functionality. Corporate IT departments have had a band-aid known as VPN for some time now, but it falls short of being the panacea vendors like Cisco make it out to be. I know this well -- I support these kinds of VPNs day to day. Their licensing is convoluted, they're drowning in client application bug hell, and most of all, bound by the performance bottlenecks on either the client or server end.
  • I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format. And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space.
  • I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format.
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  • And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space.
  • We liked Google Drive's real time collaboration functionality, but the way it treated non-Docs files was pretty pitiful.
  • Dropbox for Business provides the best headroom for growth, but it's starting monthly price is too much to swallow.
  • And Box and Egnyte don't bring much more to the table besides bona fide cloud storage and sync;
  • SharePoint Online offers a rich ecosystem that we can grow on.
  • For the purpose of running our day to day business needs, SharePoint Online has taken over for both Google Drive and our former NAS alike. We don't have to convert items to and from Google Docs anymore just to collaborate. We have as good, or better, permissions in SharePoint compared to Google Drive. And the search power in SharePoint is disgustingly accurate, providing the accuracy and file previews that we were used to on Google Drive.
  • SharePoint Online is first and foremost a cloud solution that has additional tie-ins with Office Online products, OneDrive, etc that may or may not exist in the on-premise version of the product.
  • It's a cloud file server (the focus of this piece). It's a content search hub. It can run public websites and internal intranets. It can help handle complex document workflows. You can even run Access databases on it.
  • I can finally work as I wish, in-browser or in Office 2013 -- or both at once. My entire company "file server" is synced via OneDrive for Business to my Thinkpad, and likewise, I can edit any files in a browser via Office Online apps. It's a nirvana that Google Drive almost afforded us, if it weren't for Google's distaste of traditional Office files. It's good to know you can have your cake and eat it too.
  •  
    Yesterday Google announced dramatic price reductions for their Cloud Computing platform. This announcement was followed immediately by a similar announcement from Amazon. But what about Microsoft? The truth is that Microsoft doesn't need to reduce prices, and they are forcing both Google and Amazon reductions. My guess is that there are more reductions to come too. The answer is in this review of SharePoint OnLine and Office 365, where the author points out the fact that Google Drive / Apps totally mangles an MSOffice document. Once Google converts the documents, they are useless. "I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based Cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format. And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space." In 2006-2007, when we were in the middle of the great ODF vs OOXML document wars, I had a conversation with Google's Open Source - Opoen Standards guru, Chris DiBona. It was during the Massachusetts crisis, and we were trying to garner Google Corporate support for ODF. Chris listened to my pitch and summarized his position that conversion methods were very advanced, and going forward, file formats really didn't matter. He famously said, "Let a thousand formats bloom". I wonder if he still thinks that?
Gary Edwards

People Use The Cloud And Don't Even Realize It - Business Insider - 0 views

  •  
    Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a Cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of Cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.
  •  
    Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a Cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of Cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.
Gary Edwards

Google Makes it Easier to Dump Microsoft Office #io14 - 0 views

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    "At I/O, Google always seems to find a way to squeeze the fun from Microsoft's master plan to rule the business world. This year, the 'something' comes in the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents in Google Docs. At face value, it doesn't seem too serious. But when you stand back and look at it, it takes on far more significance than first impressions convey. Who Needs Office? Equally important is the fact that Google Docs enable users to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, make changes and then save them onto the Google cloud in their native formats. By enabling users to edit Office documents through the cloud-based platform, it removes one of the biggest obstacles to Google Docs adoption. It also puts Google right up there with Microsoft Office as an option for enterprises looking for a business productivity suite. OK, we know. Microsoft Office has a lot more punch than Google Docs or even Google Apps, offering all kinds of functionality that Google still hasn't introduced. But Google Apps is still cheaper than Office 365 - and in light of this week's Outlook.com outage, it is probably looking a lot more attractive, especially to those who couldn't access their emails. It is also worth remembering that, as we saw in April, a lot of business users are using only limited functions in Office and could quite happily dump it, take up Google Docs and still work away without any problems. In fact, the research by SoftWatch showed the average employee spends only 48 minutes per day in MS Office programs, and most of that time is spent on Outlook. Other Office application use usually occurs for viewing and light editing purposes, with only a tiny portion of the workforce identified as heavy users. The new editing functionality Google is offering is also available for mobile devices along with offline support that means that users can work away on their documents even when they are out of mobile reach and have the changes uploaded once they
Gary Edwards

ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable [LWN.net] - 0 views

  • ODF on the web An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the <office:styles> and <office:automatic-styles> elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo.
  •  
    WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo.
Gary Edwards

Google is stealing away Microsoft's future corporate customers - Quartz - 0 views

  • This says two things. First, Microsoft and other vendors like IBM still have a tight grip on the largest companies.
  • Gartner analyst Tom Eid—who predicts that enterprise email alone will be a $5 billion global industry this year, growing about 10% from last year—confirms this. He estimates that Microsoft still commands 75% of the market’s spending, versus about 3% to 5% for Google.
  • Still, its legacy business of licensing software to corporations—the one under attack—generated $42 billion in highly profitable sales last fiscal year, barely growing.
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  • Microsoft has entered cloud-based email and apps markets, and said in its most recent earnings report that commercial Office 365 subscription sales—which includes email as well as Office apps—grew more than 100% year-over-year.
  • Microsoft has long dominated the corporate-software market, and its new CEO Satya Nadella has set his sights on owning all things related to productivity and the cloud. But Google—fueled by its search-advertising business and consumer popularity—has been coming on strong for years with lower-priced, cloud-based services such as email and calendars, productivity apps, video hangouts, and storage. And among certain types of customers, it is succeeding. + For a snapshot of Google’s progress, Quartz looked up the email-hosting MX records for 150 companies across three general size categories: the “Fortune 50″ largest US companies; a group of mid-size tech and media companies, both public and private; and 50 startups from the last Y Combinator incubator class in Silicon Valley. The results are…exactly what you might expect!
  • Among the Fortune 50, only one company—Google—had its mail records pointed at Google’s servers.
  • But Google is capturing Microsoft’s future customer base.
  •  
    "Microsoft has long dominated the corporate-software market, and its new CEO Satya Nadella has set his sights on owning all things related to productivity and the cloud. But Google-fueled by its search-advertising business and consumer popularity-has been coming on strong for years with lower-priced, cloud-based services such as email and calendars, productivity apps, video hangouts, and storage. And among certain types of customers, it is succeeding. + For a snapshot of Google's progress, Quartz looked up the email-hosting MX records for 150 companies across three general size categories: the "Fortune 50″ largest US companies; a group of mid-size tech and media companies, both public and private; and 50 startups from the last Y Combinator incubator class in Silicon Valley. The results are…exactly what you might expect! "
Gary Edwards

AlphaDog Barks Loudly: Why Can't You Guys Just Get Along and Solve MY MSOffice Problem!!!!! - 0 views

  • First, let me say that I am a CIO in a small (20 employees but growing fast) financial services company. I am well aware of how locked-in I am getting with our MS-only shop. I am trying to see my way out of it, but this "ODF vs ODFF" is leaving me very confused and no one is working to clear the fog. I beg for all parties to really work towards some sort of defined understanding. I don't need cooperation. But, what I don't have is well-defined positions from all parties. As it is, I feel safer staying the course with MS right now, honestly. It's what I know vs the mystery of this "open cloud" and all the bellicose infighting. How's that for "in the trenches" data? I posted a comment on Andy's blog, and I will post the same comment here for your group (minor edits): I will admit to being very, very confused by all of this ODF vs ODFF posturing. I will try to put my current thoughts in short form, but it will be a muddled mess. I warned you! From what I gather, the OpenDocument Foundation (ODFF) is attempting to create more of an interop format for working against a background MS server stack (Exchange/Sharepoint). You worry that MS is further cementing their business lock-in by moving more and more companies into dependency on not only the client-side software but also the MS business stack that has finally evolved into a serious competitive set. At that level, and in your view, the "atomic unit" is the whole document. The encoded content is not of immediate concern. ODF is concerned with the actual document content, which ODFF is prepared to ignore. The "atomic unit" is the bits and parts in the document. They want to break the proprietary encodings that MS has that lock people into MSOffice. The stack is not of any immediate concern. So, unless I misunderstand either camp, ODF is first attacking the client end of the stack, and ODFF is attacking the backbone server end of the stack. The former wants to break the MSOffice monopoly by allowing people to escape those proprietary encodings, and the latter wants to prevent the dependency on server software like Exchange and Sharepoint by allowing MS documents to travel to other destinations than MS "server" products. Is this correct? I have yet to see anyone summarize the differences in any non-partisan way, so I am at a loss and not enough information is forthcoming for me to see what's what. The usual diatribe by people closer to the action is to go into the history of ODF or ODFF, talk about old slights and lost fights, and somehow try to pull at emotional heartstrings so as to gain mindshare. Gary's set of comments on this blog have that flavor. This is childish on both sides. Furthermore, the word "orthogonal" comes to mind. I often see people too busy arguing their POV, and not listening to others, when there is no real argument to keep making. It's apple-and-oranges. ODF vs ODFF seems like they are caught in this trap. Everyone wants to win an argument that has no possible win because the participants are not arguing about the same thing. Tell me: Why can't the two parties get along? I can see a "cooperative" that attacks the entire stack. Am I the only one seeing this? Am I wrong? If yes, what's the fundamental difference that prevents cooperation?
  •  
    AlphaDog When asked about the source of his incredible success, the hockey great Wayne Gretzky replied, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." You and i need to do the same. Let me state our position as this: The desktop office suite is where the puck has been. The Exchange/SharePoint Hub is where it's going to be. The E/S Hub is the core of an emerging Microsoft specific web platform which we've also called, the MS Stack. In this stack, MSOffice is relegated to the task of a rich client end user interface into the E/S Hub of business processes and collaborative computing connections. The rest of the MS Stack swirls like a galaxy of services around the E/S Hub. Key to Microsoft's web platform is the gradual movement of MSOffice bound business processes to the E/S Hub where they connect to the rest of the MS Stack. So what now you might ask? Some things to consider before we get down to brass tacks: ... There is a way to break the monopolists MSOffice desktop grip, but it's not a rip out and replace the desktop model. It's a beat them at the E/S Hub model that then opens up the desktop space. And opens it up totally. (this is a 3-5 year challenge though since it's a movement of currently bound business processes). ... It's all about the business processes. Focusing entirely on the file formats is to miss the big picture. ... The da Vinci group's position is this; we believe we can neutralize and re purpose MSOffice by converting in proce
Gary Edwards

Google Brings Native MS Office Editing Features To Its iOS Productivity Apps - 0 views

  • Google’s new Material Design user interface language and all the Microsoft Office conversion goodness the company acquired when it bought Quickoffice in 2012.
  • Google is closing the loop on bringing support for natively editing Microsoft Office files to all of productivity apps today.
  •  
    "Google is closing the loop on bringing support for natively editing Microsoft Office files to all of productivity apps today. The company's iOS apps for Docs and Sheets are getting a couple of minor new features and design updates today, but most importantly, these apps will now also be able to natively open, edit and save files from Microsoft's Office suite. After launching the original standalone apps for Google Docs and Sheets on iOS a few months ago, it was only a matter of time before Google would also free its PowerPoint competitor Slides from the Google Drive app. Today is that day. Google Slides is now available as a standalone app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. 2014-08-25_1104Just like the Docs and Sheets apps and their counterparts on Android (the standalone Slides app launched there two months ago), the new Slides app will feature some aspects of Google's new Material Design user interface language and all the Microsoft Office conversion goodness the company acquired when it bought Quickoffice in 2012." ........................................................... Hey, Google is pulling the Cloud version of "bait and switch". The bait is calling a standalone application for iOS "native". The switch is that Microsoft is using the term "native" to describe the editing of MS Office native documents. Google is trying to market a native, written explicitly for iOS application, presenting it as "supporting native document editing and collaboration". Wow. They've got nothing!! This is just market spin. And the article's title suggests that they know exactly what they are doing with this egregious misrepresentation. There is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft has committed to the "Office 365 - native document" narrative. Its designed to totally obliterate Googe, Dropbox, Box, iCloud and anyone trying to offer Cloud based business solutions. They are going to crush Google, taking both Android and Booble Apps / GoogleDrive out of th
Gary Edwards

WebODF - 1 views

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  •  
    WebODF is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to add Open Document Format (ODF) support to your website and to your mobile or desktop application. It uses HTML and CSS to display ODF documents. WebODF is a Free Software project. All code is available under the AGPL. This means that you can use the code free of charge, investigate how it works, and share it with others. Description of WebODF From LWN: ODF on the web An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is
Gary Edwards

We Can No Longer Unbundle Microsoft Office - 0 views

  • In 2007, productivity reached the cloud when the EU forced Microsoft to open the file formats to OpenXML and add an x at the end of our familiar file extensions .pptx, .xlsx and .docx. Google Docs also quickly floated cloud versions of each Office document format. However, in the same year, Apple launched iPhone without a view to file storage on the device. Since then a lot of startup innovation came from Dropbox and Box unbundling file storage from the OS, but software that enables the creation and editing of files on touchscreen devices has been less of a concern.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      2007 was also the year that Apple released the first iPhone. ISO standardised PDF with a unique very valuable attribute; "tags". Tagged PDF raced into the mobility breach enabling all kinds of data binding and digital signature advances critical to mobile document centric workflows. In 2008 we saw a global financial collapse that put more pressure than ever on productivity. To survive, companies had to do more with less. Less people, less resources and less money. Cloud computing and mobility rose to the occasion, but the timing of the Cloud tsunami connects the incredible synchronicity of XML compound document formats (business documents), Tagged PDF, the iPhone, and the financial collapse of 2008. The rise of sync-share-store services like DropBox is a natural replacement of the local, workgroup bound, client/server hard drive problem. Most importantly though, the iPhone is the first device to integrate and combine communications with computation. The data had to move to the Cloud before it could become useful to mobile apps combining for the first time, communications, content and computation is hand held devices. Anyone who ever worked in the Microsoft client/server productivity ecosystem will tell you that the desktop PC was totally lacking in "communications"; let alone the kind of integrated communications that the iPhone offers. It is the integration of communications, content and collaborative computation that will make the productivity of Cloud Computing something extraordinary.
  • Three years ago, CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar started using OpenXML formats to bring Microsoft Office to iPad. Since then, the company opened its interface to file authoring tools from Office and Google Drive, and storage providers like Dropbox, Box and Hightail, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and will soon be hard at work adding Apple’s CloudDrive. CloudOn feels that if it focuses on providing the best compatibility and exportability across devices, then they can be the place where users can “preserve, render and manipulate” documents on mobile. Once CloudOn can maintain its goal of giving consumers a familiar look and feel and lossless publishing for all the most popular document creation and storage providers, they plan to optimize for touchscreens. CloudOn sees only single-digit-minute session times in files, so their next step is to enable gestures to edit charts and annotate text with your fingers to help make better use of that time.
  • Feature-bundled workflows to get things done on the device you’re looking at are necessities, not nice pairings like chocolate and peanut butter.
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  • Pellucid Analytics takes a different strategy to rebuilding PowerPoint. Instead of looking at PowerPoint as a design tool, Pellucid fixes the design and enables archive search for thousands of financial accounting slide templates that an analyst would need to fill a pitch book such as ROE, EBITDA and other fun acronyms. Since the formatting is already set, analysts can just enter company names and based on the data sources that the bank they work for has licensed, Pellucid can fill in any of that data automatically and keep it up to date. However, the concept of live data in presentations is a shock to most bankers, so Adrian Crockett of Pellucid admits that it’s one of the first things he has to explain to new users. Of course, Pellucid offers the ability to snapshot data for use in later presentations. But Adrian stressed that in addition to Pellucid’s approach to removing grunt work for analysts, it is giving senior bankers access to live data right in the presentation that would normally require VPN access, logins, app switching and all other sorts of headaches to be able to access, especially on tablets.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft, Apple, and Google: How three tech giants have evolved in the 21st Century | ZDNet - 0 views

  • In 2002, the Desktop Platforms division accounted for 33 percent of Microsoft's total revenue. That percentage has been steadily dropping, and in fiscal 2013, the corresponding division (which now includes Microsoft's Surface hardware) was responsible for only 25 percent of the company's steadily rising total revenue. Server products, Office and other desktop applications, and cloud services increased steadily during that time. Looking at operating income (what's left of revenue after you subtract expenses) tells a more interesting story. From 2002 through 2004, Windows was the dominant contributor to Microsoft's profits, accounting for as much as 89 percent of total operating income. But that began changing in 2005 as those investments in enterprise software and cloud services began to pay off.
  •  
    "Over the past week, I've been blowing the virtual dust off more than a decade's worth of annual reports from Microsoft, Apple, and Google. My goal was to follow the money and figure out how each company's business has changed over the past decade. Consider this a follow-up to my February post, "Apple, Google, Microsoft: Where does the money come from?" My tally starts with financial results for 2002, the year after Microsoft signed a historic consent decree that settled the U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit. It was also the first full year after the introduction of the iPod, which was the first step on Apple's transformation from a PC company to one that revolutionized mobile computing and communication. The earliest annual report I could find for Google was from 2003, the year before its big IPO. In Microsoft's case, the question I was most interested in was "How dependent is the company on Windows?" The Windows monopoly began crumbling as soon as the settlement was signed (although it's debatable how much influence that lawsuit had on the market). Over the past 10 years, Microsoft has shifted its reporting structures a few times, making it hard to draw perfect comparisons over time. But the chart below, which shows revenue from the desktop versions of Windows and related products, is close enough."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps: The ultimate guide | Applications - InfoWorld - 0 views

  •  
    "Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps have raised the bar for cloud productivity suites. Formerly pale shadows of available desktop programs, the two suites are now more than enough for many offices and businesses. But are they right for you? In this exhaustive review, InfoWorld covers multiple aspects of the cloud suites, starting with the many Office 365 SKUs and Google Apps for Business options and proceeding to: Setup Features Ease-of-use Administration Value InfoWorld examines all the details and fine points Microsoft and Google have to offer over the desktop suite -- and potential deal breakers for anyone considering the switch. If you've been thinking about breaking up with Microsoft Office on the desktop, this could be the time, but don't make any decisions before checking out InfoWorld's Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps superguide. Download this PDF -- with InfoWorld's full and complete review, along with more expert advice -- for a handy rundown of both offerings and how they apply to your business. Office 365 and Google Apps have changed in the last couple of years. Find out if it's enough for your office to make the switch too. Download InfoWorld's Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps superguide here."
Gary Edwards

OOXML/ODF: Just One Battlefield in a Much Bigger War | Linux Today - 2 views

  • If the OOXML format in its current form cannot get made into a true ISO standard, it could lock Microsoft out of any future plays in what could be the biggest IT revolution to date. Here are the pieces of the puzzle that fit together for me:
  • "Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time."
  • "Structured data." And what's a good way to contain such data? In well-built structured data file format of course. Like, for instance, the Open Document Format (ODF). And who has a vested interest in ODF? IBM certainly does. And so does Sun. And these two companies, along with Google, Microsoft, and I'm sure many others, realize that if cloud computing does indeed take off, then it will be the file format that makes the whole thing work. Which is why Microsoft feels it must get their format standardized. Even with tactics that ironically have started to attract the attention of the EU again. How else can they get a piece of the cloud pie?
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Partly right. The MS plan is actually much bigger than Brian Profitt suggests. The MSOffice 2007 SDK is fille dwith new API's, the most interesting of which are the ones connecting MSOffice to XAML and the Windows Presentation Foundation layer. The killer component though is the OOXML <> fixed/flow translator component with related API's. fixed/flow is a new web format that is 100% proprietary. It's at the heart of the Microsoft cloud, enabling developers to easily transition between OOXML and IE browsers able to serve fixed/flow pages to devices, desktops and just about any kind re purposing publication - content management system imaginable. If ISO approves OOXML, then they've standardized MSOffice as a legitamate Web editor - enterprise publication, content management, archive management front end. Instead of producing W3C compliant (X)HTML - CSS web pages though, the MSOffice Web editor will produce the proprietary fixed/flow format via the OOXML translation component we can now see in the SDK. What we don't see in the MSOffice SDK is the use of W3C technologies such as (X)HTML, CSS, SVG, XForms, SMiL, XSL, XSL-FO. Instead of Mozilla XUL or Adobe Flex, we find XAML and Silverlight. IMHO, Microsoft is making their run for the Web. Key to this run is ISO approval of OOXML. Once that happens, there will be no need for MS product compliance with W3C standards. The break will be complete. The We forever split into the Windows Web, and the Firefox - Apache Tomcat Web. And never the twain shall meet.
Gary Edwards

Notes on Breaking the Web to Ride the Fifth Wave - 1 views

  • garyedwards's Discussions Breaking the Web Talkback: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'
  •  
    Somehow i got involved in this discussion and ended up posting a number of comments explaining the how and why behind Microsoft's push for ISO approval of MS-OOXML. I have been working on a paper titled, "Breaking the Web to Ride the Great Wave". Breaking the Web is what will happen once ISO approves MS-OOXML. The MIcrosoft Stack of Web Servers (Exchange, SharePoint, MS-SQL Server) are integrated into the MSOffice-Outlook desktop. The MS desktop dominates much of the document workflows and business processes of the commercial world. ISO approval of the MSOffice specific MS-OOXML will legitamize MSOffice as an editor of standardized web ready docuemnts. But how MS-OOXML docuemnts become "Web REady" is tricky. In the December 2007 MSOffice SDK beta, we see how this is done. The SDK provides a conversion component for the quick high fidelity conversion of MS-OOXML documents to XAML. XAML is a proprietary part of the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) layer of the .NET framework, and is easily paried with Silverlight. Sometimes XAML is referred to as "fixed/flow". XAML is an MS proprietary replacement for the W3C's (X)HTML. Billions of MSOffice docuemnts will make their way to the Web using this SDK converter. The path for transitioning the monopolist hold on desktop business processes to the monopolist stack of web servers is set with this converter. ISO approval of MS-OOXML will enable Microsoft to dodge brining their desktop editor into compliance with advancing W3C standards such as (X)HTML, CSS 3, XForms, SVG and RDF. Instead of these open standards, transitioning business processes will be locked into MS only dependencies; XAML, Silverlight, WinForms, and Smart Tags. The breaking of the web results in a consumer/business cloud dependent on MS proprietary technologies that are out of the reach of Firefox, Apache, Java, and Adobe technologies. Google won't be able to penetrate the business stack, and will be kept very busy trying to defen
Gary Edwards

Office generations 1.0 - 4.0| Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: - 0 views

  • The key is to extend both functionality and interoperability without taking away any of the capabilities that users currently rely on or expect. Reducing interoperability or functionality is a non-starter, for the end user as well as the IT departments that want to avoid annoying the end user. You screw with PowerPoint at your own risk.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Exactly! This is also the reason why ODF failed in Massachusetts! Reducing the interoperability or functionality of of any workgroup related business process is unacceptable. Which is why IBM's rip out and replace MSOffice approach as the means of transitioning to ODF is doomed. The Office 2.0 (er 3.0) crowd is at a similar disadvantage. They offer web based productivity services that leverage the incredible value of web collaboration. The problem is that these collaboration services are not interoperable with MSOffice. This disconnection greatly reduces and totally neutralizes the collaboration value promise. Microsoft of course will be able to deliver that same web based collaborative comp[uting value in an integrated package. They and they alone are able to integrate web collaboration services into existing MSOffice workgroups. In many ways this should be an anti trust issue. If governments allow Microsoft to control the interop channels into MSOffice, then Microsoft web collaboration systems will be the only choice for 550 million MSOffice workgroup users. The interop layer is today an impossible barrier for Office 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS and SOA competitors. This is the reasoning behind our da Vinci CDF+ plug-in for MSOffice. Rather than continue banging the wall of IBM's transition to ODF through government legislated rip out and replace mandates, we think the way forward is to exploit the MSOffice plug-in architecture, using it to neutralize and re purpose existing MSOffice workgroups. The key is getting MSOffice documents into a web ready format that is useful to non Microsoft web platform (cloud) alternatives. This requires a non disruptive transition. The workgroups will not tolerate any loss of interop or functionality. We believe this can be done using CDF+ (XHTML 2.0 + CSS). Think of it as cutting off the transition of existing workgroup business p
  • Microsoft sees this coming, and one of its biggest challenges in the years ahead will be figuring out how to replace the revenues and profits that get sucked out of the Office market.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Bingo!
  • The real problem that I see is the reduced functionality and integration. I don’t think there can be a Revolution until someone builds an entire suite of Revolutionary office products on the web. Office has had almost (or more than, don't quote me) 15 years of experience to build a tight cohesive relationship between it's products.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Rather than replace MSOffice, why not move the desktop bound business processes to the web? Re write them to take advantage of web collaboration, universal connectivity, and universal interop.
      Once the business processes are up in the cloud, you can actually start introducing desktop alternatives to MSOffice. The trick is to write these alternative business processes to something other than .NET 3.0, MS-OOXML, and the Exchange/SharePoint Hub.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • left standing in a few years will be limited to those who succeeded in getting their products adopted and imbedded into the customers 'workflow' (for lack of a better term) and who make money from it. A silo'ed PPA is not embedded in a company's workflow (this describes 95% of the Office 2.0 companies) thus their failure is predetermined. A Free PPA is not making money thus their failure is predetermined as well. For those companies who adapt to a traditional service and support model and make it through the flurry.....would they really qualify as Office 4.0?
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Spot on! Excellent comments that go right to the heart of the matter. The Office 2.0 crowd is creating a new market category that Microsoft will easily be able to seize and exploit when the time is right. Like when it becomes profitable :)
  •  
    In this 2006 article Nick Carr lays out the history of office productivity applications, arguing the Office 2.0 is really Office 3.0 - the generation where desktop productivity office suites mesh with the Web. This article is linked to The Office question, December 18, 2007
  •  
    In this 2006 article Nick Carr lays out the history of office productivity applications, arguing the Office 2.0 is really Office 3.0 - the generation where desktop productivity office suites mesh with the Web. This article is linked to The Office question, December 18, 2007
Gary Edwards

9 Secrets to Project Management Success | CIO - 0 views

  •  
    "Project management seems so straightforward. You set a deadline. You set a budget. You select the right people. The project gets done. In reality, project management is rarely straightforward. The wrong people are assigned to the project. People don't know what is expected of them or get conflicting information. The scope changes. Deadlines aren't met. Put more succinctly: Stuff happens. Featured Resource Presented by Netskope 10 Alternatives to Heavy-Handed Cloud App Control Blocking any useful Cloud app doesn't work and ultimately does the business a disservice. This list Learn More [ 13 Tips for Keeping IT Projects Under Control ] So what can businesses, and project managers, do to improve the odds of projects being completed on time and on budget? Dozens of project leaders and project management experts share nine secrets to successful project management. "
Gary Edwards

Readium at the London Book Fair 2014: Open Source for an Open Publishing Ecosystem: Readium.org Turns One - 0 views

  •  
    excerpt/intro: Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the formation of the Readium Foundation (Readium.org), an independent nonprofit launched in March 2013 with the objective of developing commercial-grade open source publishing technology software. The overall goal of Readium.org is to accelerate adoption of ePub 3, HTML5, and the Open Web Platform by the digital publishing industry to help realize the full potential of open-standards-based interoperability. More specifically, the aim is to raise the bar for ePub 3 support across the industry so that ePub maintains its position as the standard distribution format for e-books and expands its reach to include other types of digital publications. In its first year, the Readium consortium added 15 organizations to its membership, including Adobe, Google, IBM, Ingram, KERIS (S. Korea Education Ministry), and the New York Public Library. The membership now boasts publishers, retailers, distributors and technology companies from around the world, including organizations based in France, Germany, Norway, U.S., Canada, China, Korea, and Japan. In addition, in February 2014 the first Readium.org board was elected by the membership and the first three projects being developed by members and other contributors are all nearing "1.0" status. The first project, Readium SDK, is a rendering "engine" enabling native apps to support ePub 3. Readium SDK is available on four platforms-Android, iOS, OS/X, and Windows- and the first product incorporating Readium SDK (by ACCESS Japan) was announced last October. Readium SDK is designed to be DRM-agnostic, and vendors Adobe and Sony have publicized plans to integrate their respective DRM solutions with Readium SDK. A second effort, Readium JS, is a pure JavaScript ePub 3 implementation, with configurations now available for cloud based deployment of ePub files, as well as Readium for Chrome, the successor to the original Readium Chrome extension developed by IDPF as the
  •  
    excerpt/intro: Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the formation of the Readium Foundation (Readium.org), an independent nonprofit launched in March 2013 with the objective of developing commercial-grade open source publishing technology software. The overall goal of Readium.org is to accelerate adoption of ePub 3, HTML5, and the Open Web Platform by the digital publishing industry to help realize the full potential of open-standards-based interoperability. More specifically, the aim is to raise the bar for ePub 3 support across the industry so that ePub maintains its position as the standard distribution format for e-books and expands its reach to include other types of digital publications. In its first year, the Readium consortium added 15 organizations to its membership, including Adobe, Google, IBM, Ingram, KERIS (S. Korea Education Ministry), and the New York Public Library. The membership now boasts publishers, retailers, distributors and technology companies from around the world, including organizations based in France, Germany, Norway, U.S., Canada, China, Korea, and Japan. In addition, in February 2014 the first Readium.org board was elected by the membership and the first three projects being developed by members and other contributors are all nearing "1.0" status. The first project, Readium SDK, is a rendering "engine" enabling native apps to support ePub 3. Readium SDK is available on four platforms-Android, iOS, OS/X, and Windows- and the first product incorporating Readium SDK (by ACCESS Japan) was announced last October. Readium SDK is designed to be DRM-agnostic, and vendors Adobe and Sony have publicized plans to integrate their respective DRM solutions with Readium SDK. A second effort, Readium JS, is a pure JavaScript ePub 3 implementation, with configurations now available for cloud based deployment of ePub files, as well as Readium for Chrome, the successor to the original Readium Chrome extension developed by IDPF as the
Gary Edwards

HTML5 data communications - 1 views

    • Gary Edwards
       
      Sounds like the core of a 1992 Windows Desktop Productivity "Compound Document" model.  Applications need to message, exchange and link data.  In 1992, the key technologies embedded in a compound document were DDE, OLE, ODBC, scripts and macros.  Later on, ActiveX and COM was added.  Today the MSOffice desktop productivity environment links into the MS-Live Productivity Cloud or the BPOS - SharePoint private Cloud with a raft of WPF-SilverlightX stuff.  Good to see the Open Web fighting back with their own compound document model.
  • Cross-document messaging
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