The Barbarians Are At The Gate, But Microsoft Moves To Protect Office Revenues | Hacker News Reader

The Barbarians Are At The Gate, But Microsoft Moves To Protect Office Revenues

techcrunch.com

9 pointsnickb7 comments

I truly think that Microsoft knows their market. Web applications are great for the general consumer market, but not for the corporate market. I don't think corporations want their confidential documents directly accessible to another corporation (Google) or to anyone that could guess/crack the password to the service. This is why desktop software is still relevant. For example, the large corporation that I work for has denied access to Google Docs to ensure that it is not used.

Though, Google Docs could be useful to the corporate world if it were possible to install it on a local server in the corporate environment. That way the access to the documents could be directly controlled.

What's really missing is strong cross platform encryption that can be performed on the browser (from javascript). That way the data can be stored encrypted in a centralized location and decrypted only on the client side. This is harder to do for things like email because Google needs to target ads, but for google docs this should work.

That's not a very good approach to encryption. It still requires you to trust Google not to send you malicious JS. While I trust Google a lot more than I trust any other company their size, a private key in the hands of ten thousand employees still isn't very private.

I am more concerned with someone breaking into Google and walking away with everyone's email than I am about Google sending malicious Javascript but you have a good point and malicious employees can cause a lot of harm.

can't say i'm convinced of the web-based future of applications myself. the idea strikes me as very mainframey. i'm sure the potential is there, but a rebirth of some sort might be necessary

in particular, i don't see the benefit of web-based apps vs traditional desktop ones. there's a few, such as the centralization of files, but they seem pretty negligible. it's possible web-based apps have been conceptually intermingled with web 2.0

either way, Microsoft isn't exactly sitting around, having just released Silverlight

"...such as the centralization of files..."

This one is huge. Edit your files at any time from any computer. Your friends, co-workers and collaborators can edit the same documents, even at the same time from different places. With a single history of revisions. Backups taken care of for you (maybe you don't trust google on this but they probably do a better job backing up data than the majority of the computer using population).

This one thing alone changes the entire paradigm of document creation, sharing, etc.

This is definitely the type of news startups want to hear. I'm sure quite a few of them had a huge sigh of relief. :)

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