Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers

techcrunch.com

20 pointsvaksel22 comments

I worked on the team developing the Word and OneNote web apps this summer. Just finished on Friday. I'm happy to try and answer any questions.

What would you say is the correspondence between OneNote desktop and web? If it is as flexible on the web as the desktop, I would be very impressed (and happy, it's a great app but it never made a lot of sense for me since I use a lot of different machines).

I worked on the Word App (specifically, the viewing side of things rather than the editing side) so I didn't use the OneNote app that much. But I did play with it a little, and from what I saw it has the same core functionality as the rich client. Not sure about the fancier stuff like Outlook task integration. But it's certainly the case that you'll be able to create notebooks, sections, and pages, and take notes as you normally would.

Sorry that's not a great answer - I'd never used OneNote before this summer and I still don't know all the features even in the rich client, so it's hard for me to say if the web app is equally "flexible".

> it's a great app but it never made a lot of sense for me since I use a lot of different machines).

Isn't there a way, even in Office 2007, to share a notebook across multiple machines? I haven't used it but when you create a new notebook you have to pick either "I will use it on this computer", "I will use it on multiple computers", or "Multiple people will share this notebook". I imagine that might fill your current need.

Thanks.

What you describe sounds promising since I am mostly concerned about retaining the "click anywhere and start typing" nature of the app rather than the tight integration with the rest of Office.

There are a couple of different methods for sharing such as sharepoint and shared drives. I am giving it a shot with Dropbox at my new gig to see how it works out. I would like to be able to treat it like I do my Moleskine - always there, always up to date.

The site looks wrong on safari 4.0.3 http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/

That's unfortunate, but my team builds the web apps, not the Office website. And the web apps do officially support the latest versions of Safari and Firefox.

All I can offer about the Office site is that it works perfectly in Opera 10, including the Silverlight video. :p

oh sorry i followed this link from techcrunch, i guess the right one is http://www.officelive.com/

Office Live is actually something else; I believe it's a cloud storage/sync service for Office 2007. The first link you had was the correct one for Office 2010, which includes the Web Apps. http://office2010themovie.com is another, though I have to say I think it's a bit strange. There's some interesting stuff on there, though unfortunately the web apps video (the Terry Crowley one) doesn't have much in the way of product or technical detail.

Wow, this is kind of a confusing mess of branding and offers.

Agreed...the Office 2010 The Movie thing is a bit weird. In general, while it's improving, I think Microsoft's marketing is pretty poor. That said, you are mixing preview sites for Office 2010 (again, I don't know why there are two - that is bad) and current services for Office 2007.

Did ever something named "X killer" actually kill X?

Yes, 'competitor' would have been just fine as 'killer' depends on performance and a bunch of other unknowns.

But anyway, good on MS, I'm glad to see what competition will bring and I do quite like office so I'll give it a whirl, as well as seeing how Google responds.

I like how much of the screen is lost due to horizontal crap up the top. The fake title bar, etc.

You can pop the web app out of the SkyDrive interface, and the ribbon is minimize-able just like in Office.

Google Apps appear to have been stagnant while MS worked on this. Is that really the case, or does Google too have something up their sleeve?

Who really knows, but Google loves to spoil other people's releases (c.f. Wolfram Alpha vs. Google Squared).

I am anxious to see how much of the functionality remains. The business world loves Office, specifically Excel. If they can maintain some of the more intense features of Excel (Macros, Pivot Tables, etc.) then they me be on to something that high paying enterprises would want.

I've yet to use a web or desktop app that comes close to Excel. Zoho may be the closest, but Excel is the gold standard.

I found it curious that there's an ad unit on the onenote product page http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx .

"Imitation isn't always flattery" Surely Google imitated in the first place

Google "bought", didn't they?

Yup, imitating Microsoft from the beginning ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com