We touched upon the subject of an OOo online service on the marketing mailing list (message "OpenOffice is dead"), and I'd like our community to discuss this and come up with a resolution. OOo has a tough road ahead of it: this is a time of massive web service adoption as well as staggering activity in mobile hardware and new mobile operating systems (iPhone OS, Android, Windows 7 Phone, ...). So how to deal with this? Well, first of all, I hope we're all agreed on OOo adopting certain features to better integrated with various online services. What's not yet clear, though, is what these features should be and when and how should they be incorporated into OOo. With the Renaissance, it's important to consider and discuss these things, because, frankly, we don't want to painstakingly adjust the new interface to added online features. So, please, let's brainstorm some things either here or let's create a wiki page for this. Secondly, I wonder how commited OOo is to being cross-platfrom and accessible. I mean, right now, there's and influx of new mobile operating systems: from Apple's closed iPhone OS that started the whole thing (and now powers the iPad, which is already breaking records in orders) to Google's awesome open-source Android OS for phones and Chrome OS for netbooks. OOo will either need to get in the game or lose out as these platforms become stronger. And that's where I think a very basic OOo web application comes in handy. It doesn't have to be very powerful, it doesn't have to have many features, but it should be competent enough to keep OOo cross-platform and on par with competitors. The great thing is, we don't have to start from scratch: there are already basic open-source services to base an online OOo on, like EtherPad (the development of which has been discontinued) or Feng Office (which can create and edit documents and presentations, but doesn't export to ODF). I imagine the online OOo to be used mainly for quick edits and very simple crafting, at least initially, because I expect the main user base to be the brisk, on-the-move crowd. Oracle could host user files (and offer free), but it should definitely offer integration with other file hosting services, like Ubuntu One or Google Docs. Anyway, I think it's also a topic to discuss, and start work on after we reach an agreement. If we really decide to go ahead with an OOo web app, it'd be nice if we went really slowly and got the UI and code base exactly right the first time (I'd like a more object-oriented approach than in the current desktop OOo). It doesn't matter if we're late to the game if we do it right (just look at the iPhone, or compare today's excitement for the iPad with that of the Tablet PC). Here's a nice related article on how Apple develops its products: http://www.macworld.com/article/151235/2010/05/apple_rolls.html?lsrc=smokemonster .
P. S. On an unrelated note, I posted an Impress UI proposal ( http://clickortap.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/distractions/) on the UX discuss list and haven't yet received any responses. Please comment on it: any feedback will do, really, I just want to know whether it might be an improvement over the current way of doing things or if I'm just way off track.
