On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Scott Granneman <[email protected]> wrote: > And did you see what Facebook & Microsoft announced yesterday? Whoa. > That's got the potential to be HUGE and drive many many more users to > the cloud.
Possibly, which is what FB and MS are hoping for. In full disclosure, I'm not a big FB fan. I use it because for some things it is useful. But I actually find it a bit of a disorganized mess. For example, there's no obvious way to filter, search, tag, or organize posts as it's not really a blog and not accessible via any search engine. Now they've added Docs. For me that's not even a little plus. I currently have in excess of 100+ documents (ods, doc, xls, odt, ppt, opp, etc.) locally. I'm trying to imagine what having 100+ documents on Facebook would look like. Yes, it's huge -- a huge mess. Granted, it's also a start and will probably get more organized over time. But entropy doesn't favor that. > http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/202851.asp > http://www.pcworld.com/article/194731/microsofts_docs_for_facebook_a_handson_tour.html > > You can keep fighting the battles of the past, or you can figure out > how to embrace the future & make it as good as possible. The problem with the future is that it isn't evenly distributed. The future is a small niche for the early adopters. There is a huge segment of the populace that isn't there, yet. There are still a lot of dinosaurs, e.g. buying/selling a house is still mostly done with physical paper. As for reading and creating ODF files, OOo is just one of many options. If you can't open it with MS Office and can't install OOo, then go the cloud route with Google docs, which reads/writes ODF, MS Office, RTF, HTML, and text. So there really isn't a need for an ODF plug-in for MS Office. If Oracle can get away with charging $90 for it, good for them. If the plug-in dies a market death, no big loss. BTW, I don't see the future as all in the cloud. We've been there before with mainframes, where all the computation and data was "somewhere else." Then came the PCs. And people really like the idea of being able to do things quickly and having control over their own data, locally. Then came the Internet followed by cloud services. Now we are going back to the model of computation and data being "somewhere else." That's fine and dandy until you realize that you don't have as much control as you might like and you don't always have that network connection. I suspect the future will be some combination: parts in the cloud (or likely, different clouds) and parts on my local device (or likely, different devices). And when the data is local, I'll need to have that dinosaur app to work with the data. Regards, - Robert -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
