It reminds me of all those hundreds of early 20th century battleships that suddenly became completely irrelevant when the Dreadnought came by.
[Edit: replaced nearly nonexistent with irrelevant to make my point clearer]
If you mean that we've moved from desktop office apps to cloud-based Office apps that's absolutely not true.
The numbers I've seen for Google Docs etc are insignificant compared to office workers using MS Office and the rest. People who think Cloud docs have "won" apparently don't share the sames experiences with 99% of office workers in enterprise/businesses/governments etc.
In startup-land and small web businesses yes, cloud docs do well, but those are insignificant numbers-wise to the millions upon millions of classic office workers.
LibreOffice might be irrelevant, but that's because not many care for a free/open source office suite that's not MS Office, not because we've moved to Cloud documents.
Even if "99% of office workers in enterprise/businesses/governments etc" do their work on the desktop, there's still some appeal to being able to get what you want where you want it. This is where LibreOffice is trailing badly (as is Google Docs).
That implies most companies are willing to trust their business secrets to the cloud. That isn't what I see happening, not in medium sized business or enterprises.
https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-custom...
Quite a lot use salesforce.com and other services. It isn't the majority, but the cloud business is big and it's growing fast.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2974016/enterprise-appl...
Try working with a 200 MB document in Google Docs or Onedrive .Do you really think people that have to work 8 hours a day on such documents can afford a web app being slow and unresponsive ? There will always be a place for native apps. Yes the web is getting better, but it certainly didn't deliver its promise when it comes to replacing desktop apps, or PC games or whatever.
Sure, you'll still need native systems for a few heavy functions (finance will keep on using excel for quite a while), but most of the use cases don't need a full-sized productivity suite.
Or that's what those that built them think.
Then they found out performance and latency make it a non starter, and those "10% of features" that people use from Word, Powerpoint etc, are not the same 10% of everybody, so minimal web based replacements wont cut it.
In short: Calling Google docs a "non-starter" seems like a difficult position to defend. It's already in use by millions of people, daily, and growth is high. There are plenty of folks, including businesses, who have opted not to install MS Office and instead use Docs for everything. Sure, there are plenty of situations where that doesn't work, but as the "web as a platform" advances, and as office products on the web advance, the reasons for sticking with installed apps will continue to decline.
There will continue to be need for installed applications for heavy users for a long time to come (nobody is suggesting serious video or audio editing online, yet, but image editing is already reasonably do-able). Text-based and number-based documents? Those are easy. The very first personal computers could do them pretty well (Visicalc and WordStar, among others), and the web as a platform is vastly more powerful than the Apple II, C64, or IBM PC, that ran those products. And, they're also very easy to work on over very slow connections; you download the whole doc and check in changes in the background. Effectively making all the work happen on the client-side. No big deal.
It's just the same thing as comparing nano to emacs/vim. Sure, they both superficially edit text, but that's where the comparison ends.
To argue that what is true today will remain true effectively forever is to ignore the entire history of computing. Desktop applications won't win in the end. Every time a credible web-based alternative has arisen, it has won and destroyed the old way of doing things. So much so that we forget old ways even existed. In a decade I'll be surprised if there is still a desktop version of Office even still in development. There will be web-based versions that work without Internet access, but there won't be a version you "install" on your client machine. I'd bet it'll be sooner for most people, but there will remain outliers for several years beyond which there is a good business case for sticking with Office installed on each users machine.
Copy paste? No, not without Flash. Calendar notifications that work when the browser is closed? Custom fonts? Vertical text? Software that doesn't rot? Accurate page layouts?
If these new functionalities were so good and browser integrations were so powerful, then phones wouldn't need app stores, GMail/Google Docs wouldn't have a mobile application, etc. I'm more than ready to bet that in a decade, there will still be a desktop version of Office.
What? Of course copy paste works, even with formatting. Or, at least it does on my machine. Spreadsheets are trickier, but there are ways to override the context menu to make it do-able. I assume Google docs can already do it. Haven't tried it specifically, but I don't remember not being able to...so pretty sure I have copied and pasted within a docs spreadsheet.
"Calendar notifications that work when the browser is closed?"
Why would your browser be closed? This is the future we're talking about. Your desktop and everything else will be in your browser. That's like complaining that notifications don't work when your computer is unplugged.
"Custom fonts? Vertical text?"
Already possible and covered by standards. Are you using IE10, or something?
"Software that doesn't rot?"
Hahahah. Funny. How's Visual Basic written ten years ago holding up on Win 10? Sure, it probably runs, but nobody wants to use it. Platforms evolve. Standards compliant HTML and JavaScript written ten years ago is still functional. What do you believe is uniquely prone to "rot" about the web platform?
All of the app stores have hundreds of apps built on web technologies. Google has a mobile version, but does not have a desktop version. In fact, GMail (and moreso, Inbox) are much better evidence for the case I'm making (that the web will devour almost every class of software in a decade) than the case you're making (that office software like Word and Excel are uniquely immune to being devoured). Inbox is a better mail client than Outlook. And Docs will become a better doc suite than Office...or somebody else will build one that is (might even be Microsoft that builds it...if they're smart, it will be).
This is true, but it doesn't have to be one or the other. Office 365 lets you have full-strength desktop programs as well as web apps and smartphone apps, at one low price.
This may be why Office 365 seems to be growing faster than Google Docs, and why it has overtaken it, according to one survey. (1)
Of course, there are other considerations. First, most real businesses need something much more powerful than today's web apps. Second, Microsoft Office is a programmable platform with a huge range of third-party add-ons. Third, a lot of big companies have two decades of Office programming and Office documents. Even if they really want to move everything to the cloud, they're going to run hybrid and in-house cloud systems for a long time....
(1) http://www.computerworld.com/article/2974016/enterprise-appl...
Any actual evidence for this in the Office suite space? Because I don't see it happening at all. It was an empty promise of 5-6 years ago, same as "Year of the Linux desktop" never came to be.
For mail and collaboration (Slack, Jira, Asana etc), sure, web solutions will prevail. After all those things are all about the social, collaborative features the web brings to the table.
Sales and marketing are often heavy Excel users from what I've seen. Even with the uptake of Salesforce (seems to be used more and more), you still have lots of Excel users. HR is usually a tiny bit of the company so I don't really find that interesting.
I mostly see a mix of things at best.
Take pagers, the concept (delivering messages) still exists, but the mass market for dedicated, dumb message receivers disappeared a long time ago, leaving only a few niches.
Any company doing a mass-market, native-only, offline-only office productivity suite is bound to fade into oblivion, unless it changes. And that's the point of my original post, LibreOffice is going exactly through that.
I'm afraid your point is still not clear. What's your metric for declaring a market irrelevant?
A conventional office suite is still the solution which is overwhelmingly dominating the market. Maybe look outside your own bubble and bias. A lot of business will never give away there confidential documents in the hands of third party cloud hosts. (which is the sane approach). So what's your criteria for calling that niche, irrelevant or even non-existent?
http://www.winbeta.org/news/office-365-overtakes-google-apps... Bitglass also found that the share of companies using a cloud application for their productivity suite rose from 28% last year to 48% this year. Their report shows that Microsoft has successfully capitalized on the growth in cloud based productivity suite adoption rates to take the lead from Google.
It works just fine for me and I'm not going anywhere for now so this little part of the 'market' will be around for a while.
The ability to own and administer your files is severely under-rated.
> The ability to own and administer your files is severely under-rated.
Or severely over-rated depending who you ask :)
Give it some time.
Can you give something to back the claim?
The extension interface of Libre Office even lets me think that this would be technically a triviality to integrate.
Maybe with an open standard instead of a propriety and closed eco system,
with the freedom to choose whom you trust with your data, or to host it yourself.
I still crave for a really nice word processor, spreadsheet, and easy database app (in the style of Access). I've always found *Office a bit rough around the edges.
My partner recently brought home an iPad from work. Word failed to play well with other (MS Word) Office documents, so file exchange and formats are still a complete pain in the neck. I will be using plain text until something better comes along.
The word processor and spreadsheet are rudimentary and the OOXML compatibility is terrible.
My favourite new feature in LibreOffice is the Google Drive integration (a first-class feature in LO 5.1). Because sometimes I need a proper bloody word processor or to read an OOXML doc someone's sent me.
LO Online will be proper LO at the back end, so will be that word processor etc.
The current core market for office productivity suites are business, followed by consumer. And I'd bet only a very small minority of those are sticking with plain text files until something better comes along.
Didn't RTF coma along a couple of decades ago?