Ask Slashdot: Can Quickoffice On Chromebooks Topple Microsoft's Office?

Nerval's Lobster writes "As we discussed yesterday, Google is bringing a Quickoffice viewer to its new high-end Chromebook Pixel, with full editing ability expected within three months. According to TechCrunch, Quickoffice-on-Chromebooks comes courtesy of Native Client. If Chromebooks prove a hit (and Google ports Quickoffice onto devices other than the ultra-high-priced Chromebook Pixel), could that mean the beginning of the end of Microsoft Office's market dominance of the productivity software space? While Microsoft has been pushing into the cloud with software like Office 365, that's also Google's home territory. But can Google actually disrupt the game?"

Apple were wrong

[tuppe666]

The "consumer market" is not what drives Office sales and use, it's business sales and use.

Steve Balmer said the the iPhone would fail because enterprise wanted a phone with a keyboard [its quite famous]. I don't know if its true about enterprise adopting quickoffice, but the days of enterprise influencing your purchasing habits have long gone.

Re:No.

[JDG1980]

Most business use Office only because they don't know any better.

Most businesses use MS Office because:

1. It's what all of their staff is already trained on.
2. They need to be able to reliably and accurately interchange documents with other people and organizations who use MS Office. Close isn't good enough.
3. In many cases, they have business logic coded into some arcane VBA applet. The only competitor I know of that has even started to do anything with VBA is Open/LibreOffice, and even then it is very sketchy and far from enterprise-ready.
4. MS Office is easy to push out and manage through Group Policy. This is the same reason why IE still rules in the enterprise, even when the IE6 dependencies have finally been gotten rid of.

Re:it doesn't have to

[Cwix]

My copy was ten dollars for 2013. My 2010 copy cost me ten dollars. Both were the "Professional" versions. Both copies were purchased through Microsoft's home use program. From what I understand if you have a work email from a company that has a Software Assurance agreement with Microsoft you're eligible. You can even just enter your email in to see if you are eligible. If it had been anything more, I wouldn't have been interested.

http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/home.aspx?culture=en-US&page=lookup [microsofthup.com]

Not even close; Office is stupidly overpriced.

[tuppe666]

only idiots spent $200 for MS Office at home

Yeah especially when it only costs $140.

I would have to pay For the crippled home and business 2013 its £220($333) and for office professional its £390 ($590)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-office-professional-2013-FX102918381.aspx?WT.intid1=ODC_ENGB_FX010064710_XT103927664&WT.intid2=ODC_ENGB_FX010064710_XT103927685 [microsoft.com]

Re:So, you think the Pixel is...

[Anonymous Coward]

My company has its own intranet, with online document storage and email that works fine with any web browser.

Local storage on laptops etc is already being deprecated.

Re:no

[Anonymous Coward]

And then insert some stupid comment about how LibreOffice is awesome (which it is, but in that case, why can't it disrupt MS Office?).

LibreOffice IS awesome, but there are differences between it & MSOffice that get in the way. The big holdover is medium to large businesses and in some cases schools.

1. Anyone who has an MSOffice site license or gets laptops from a large corporate account (with MSO preinstalled) will stick with MSOffice until there is a major change in the computing environment because they have a solution that works and they've already committed to the financial cost.
2. Native file type support - when exchanging documents with other organizations, LO/OOO has a history of screwing up MSWord formatting & pagination pretty badly. So if you need to edit a native MSWord doc & distribute it to MSWord users, LO will give you headaches.
3. LO is fairly new, and less known than it's predecessor OOO, so it hasn't had much time to penetrate.
4. Excel has (until recently) scaled better than Calc, and has extensive & weird macro support. There are lots of shops that have forms that are filled with Excel macros and a few who make really large tables, for whom a shift to Calc would be burdensome.

I don't really know QuickOffice, but I have to suspect that it will suffer from all of the same problems.

Re:In a word, no. Compatibility.

[walterbyrd]

> what is this magical scam, one that can be avoided by installing a free plugin from microsoft so that office 2003 can read 2007 files?

The OOXML scam that MS bribed (caught red-handed) the ISO to accept as a standard. A standard that only one company can really adopt.

Who care about 2003 and 2007? Those were generations ago.

> what is more standard than a format thats been going on for nearly 30 fucking years

You think that MS is using the same format that it was using 30 years ago? You are completely ignorant, or just a filthy liar.

> I dont have time for your hippy freetard bullshit

Yeah, all of us "hippy freetards" have .mil addresses, and work for the DoD. You seem angry and defensive.