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IBM Java Programming Software

IBM To Publish Java Office Suite 242

Posted by timothy from the what-if-the-network's-down dept.
prostoalex writes "The Big Blue will bundle J2EE-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics applications in its WebSphere portal. What's more interesting is that the package is server-side, with functionality of the application being delivered to the user over the network. Both CRN (linked above) and The Register considered that a major move against MSFT."
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IBM To Publish Java Office Suite More

IBM To Publish Java Office Suite

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  • Wasn't corel going to do this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:34AM (#5719902) Journal
    Subject speaks of the comment.
    • Corel tried to deliver a Java based WordPerfect Office, but it lived on the client. I understand that the performance was so miserable that the attempt was scrapped after a couple of beta's.

    • Re:Wasn't corel going to do this? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jasonditz ( 597385 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:41AM (#5719929) Homepage
      More than "going to" they did it. Word Perfect 8.0 for Java was available, but it didn't do all that well.

      Corel probably jumped the gun a little. The thing ran horribly at the time, because bytecode execution was so slow... and the vm's weren't tremendously mature on most platforms, so it wasn't altogether stable. I have a friend who is still using is, and with modern JIT compilers and higher speed computers it really runs like a dream.

      Want my opinion? Java version of Word Perfect runs better on Linux than that Wine-enhanced native Linux version they released ever did.

      • Wine (Score:3, Interesting)

        by SHEENmaster ( 581283 )
        only works for x86 boxes. Many of us use PowerPC or Sparc chipsets, and the java version runs a hell of a lot faster than the wine version in bochs!
      • Want my opinion? Java version of Word Perfect runs better on Linux than that Wine-enhanced native Linux version they released ever did.

        I read an interview with some of the people working on the Wine version of Corels stuff, and they claimed that it had been pushed out far earlier than the development team wanted. Apparently there was an internal service pack, never released, that really brought things up to scratch.


      • I think one of IBM's main problems here will be ubiquity. Since only a fraction of companies use Domino, that means only a fraction of that will end up using IBM's office suite. Who wants to use an office suite that nobody else uses? That's a really scary vendor lockin situation IMO.

        Second, though, wouldn't you think that everyone's already learned in or trained in an existing office suite by the time they are ready to purchase IBM's product? Be it MS Office or one of many already existing alternatives
    • Corel made a java word perfect. It lived client-side and it sucked.

      It was slow, and depending on which JAVA VM you used depended on how long it would go before crashing.

      It will be remembered as one of the many wasted efforts from the java-craze years.

    • Yeah. However in this case it's IBM and that makes all the difference. Why? Because IBM dose not need to make any money off selling this cra^M^M^MSoftware.

      What dose this mean for the future of desktop software? Follow my logic below and see if you hit the same conclusion.

      1. For individuals running Namebrand desktops and Portables MSOffice _looks_ free.

      2. For those running none Windows OSs. OpenOffice/StarOffice and maybe kOffice are all that matter.

      3. For those who currently have contracts with MS.

  • Spectacular! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by knightinshiningarmor ( 653332 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:39AM (#5719917)
    Good job, IBM! It's always nice to see an industry leader promoting competition in the software arena. It forces all candidates to develop a better product. Perhaps this will spark some ideas with M$? (Not that they'll be any good, but still... ;-) )

  • 100% FREE! (Score:5, Funny)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:40AM (#5719922) Journal
    Free, 100% Free, when you buy our $580,000 WebSphere Portal software/server combo!

    -
    http://fink.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    • Re:100% FREE! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by namespan ( 225296 )
      Free, 100% Free, when you buy our $580,000 WebSphere Portal software/server combo!

      However, just imagine for a moment that you're a company with 1,000+ employees. You probably spend at least $500 per person on MS Office+OS licensing fees per year alone. So... if IBM's product delivers, you could shave $500,000 off that budget. And you're getting WebSphere Portal in the bargain.

      Doesn't look so bad.

  • I don't get the point (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sridev ( 663490 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:41AM (#5719932)
    How does making the application server side help in office applications? These are inherently GUI based applications with the focus on WYSIWYG. Why J2EE, all J2EE would do is save the files?

  • Tired Of MS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LamerX ( 164968 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:45AM (#5719947) Journal
    I think that people are going to notice that there are other office suites out there... Especially if it comes bundled with the server. I know plenty of people who are tired of the way you have to pay $230+ for MS Office per machine. This definitely is a threat to MS.

    Also, I wonder if they will adopt an existing file format, or if they are just going to go on thier own. I would think that people would like it much better, and would be less hesitant to switch to it, if they didn't have to hassle with thier file formats...

    • Re:Tired Of MS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by anonymous loser ( 58627 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @12:26PM (#5721615)
      Especially if it comes bundled with the server. I know plenty of people who are tired of the way you have to pay $230+ for MS Office per machine. This definitely is a threat to MS.

      I'm not so sure about this. If IBM guarantees that it is 100% compatible with MS Office products, I can see this happening, but that's probably not the case. The problem as I see it is that MS Office is the defacto "standard" exchange format for office documents. Even if your whole company changes over to a new suite of office tools, you still have the odious problem of sending and receiving "standard" MS office documents to all the people you do business with.

      If you haven't worked in "real" office setting before, trust me on this. I can't count the number of office documents I have to send and receive every single day. Personally, I always try to stick to vanilla text files or HTML instead of word documents, since the extra formatting word allows for is important only occasionally. And, in the past I've done my best to use OpenOffice to work with other office documents, but there's always little glitches that are noticible enough that I'd hesitate to use it on something critical, lest a time-consuming and potentially expensive problem arise. If there were some other standard I could use for spreadsheets and powerpoint slides that I'd be *sure* was going to work on the other guy's computer, I'd be all over it. However, the fact remains that there isn't, and no matter what, people will continue to send me documents in MS format, which I'd better be able to read properly or risk going out of business.

      So, in summation, I offer a challenge to IBM: I want to see your entire company (and in particular your services division) dump any copies of MS Office, and stick to using your own office suite for document exchange. If you can pull this off for without any hitches (especially after Office 2003 is being OEM'ed with new computer sales), THEN I'll be convinced it's safe to switch.

  • Newsflash! No one is losing sleep in Redmond. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LibertineR ( 591918 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:50AM (#5719960)
    Microsoft doesnt care.

    If anything, it bodes well for Microsoft, because it gives them another solution to point to as a competitor, dispelling claims about MSOffice being a monopoly.

    File formats? Compatible with Office? I doubt it. That means this thing is boat anchor. Either that, or it will join those thousands of boxes of the old Lotus Suite gathering dust in cabinets that companies got for buying Notes.

    If there was an award for software distributed that never got used, nobody would ever beat IBM.

    • They should... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      "Microsoft doesnt care."

      But they should. Imagine if IBM does what IBM typically does well, which is deliver high-end computing in large-scale environments, with this product for users...

      Large companies, school districts, government organizations, anywhere that has had computers longer than Microsoft has been in full force will be able to appreciate this. It's a support thing. If you can have a platform independent system that is centrally installed and highly available, you'll make it in evironment

      • Re:They should... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by j3110 ( 193209 )
        That's your typical Slashdot idiocy. Most Slashdotters don't know the percentages of Fortune 500 companies that are already using WebSphere that will be more than happy to have a unified system for their whole business.

        From then on, they only have to upgrade one product every year instead of 2. For some businesses, buy WebSphere for there network may turn out to be cheaper than 400$/machine with Office.

        I guess there aren't many Slashdotters that actually think about the possibilities before the make swe

    • From the parent comment: "If there was an award for software distributed that never got used, nobody would ever beat IBM."

      Exactly. Remember TopView? It was a way of running multiple programs under DOS. That was the beginning, I guess, of the present software incompetence of IBM. Their failures seem to be a political problem with management.

      IBM killed SmartSuite so efficiently! One month they bought it, and the next month it was dead! Awesome!

      I remember news reports saying that IBM had lost $1,0

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @03:59AM (#5720154)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Have you actually tried SWT on anything but Windows? It's awful! SWT is inherently not cross platform so it solves the Java GUI support problem on one platform only. On any one platform you can apply optimisations for Swing to get it to run really well on that particularly platform. Look at the Aqua look and feel for 1.3 on OS X.

          Writing yet another windowing system based on the same concepts as the original is not the answer to the problem, taking the time to optimise the existing code is the answer t

          • Have you actually tried SWT on anything but Windows? It's awful!


            1. It came out recently. It will get faster.
            2. It's faster than swing.
            3. It's NOT aweful on OSX.

            And once someone writes a plugin for the OS, that's it. Nothing else. Look how many times gtk was ported.. or qt? It's not inherently platform itself, but your code itself is since it (swt) uses a fascade pattern to make all the api's common.
          • Have you actually tried SWT on anything but Windows? It's awful! SWT is inherently not cross platform so it solves the Java GUI support problem on one platform only.

            Actually, yes we are using SWT on a stand-alone application project right now. And no, we haven't had any cross-platform problems with it using the same SWT code for Windows 2000, Mac OS X and Linux (GTK, Red Hat 8) concurrently.

            As well I found that Eclipse 2.1 for Mac OS X is just as GUI-sluggish as the rest of the OS X apps, so no big difference there. True, Windows beats it hands down for speed, but that's not SWT's fault - it's Mac OS X's fault.

            The Linux GTK version of Eclipse 2.1 performed quite well on my AMD 1.47Ghz -- better than Mac OS X's performance and about 80%-90% as fast as Windows.

            SWT was designed to be a "thin" abstraction layer. True, the other platform versions of SWT are a bit behind Windows SWT in terms of features (view dragging in Eclipse comes to mind) and speed but I think they are satisfactory. I'm really looking forward to further SWT developments from IBM.

      • Re:Here piggy, piggy. And the pig comes 1 year lat (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Bodrius ( 191265 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @08:54AM (#5720755) Homepage
        True, IBM has experience killing off retail software, like SmartSuite.

        But they also have experience dealing well with server software, like Websphere.

        This is not competition for today's bloated Microsoft Office running on your desktop. This is competition for tomorrow's subscription Microsoft Office running on your company's big iron server.

        Bloat is a not that much of an issue there (and at the Websphere price scale), and I don't expect it to be that bloated, memory-wise. It's likely to have less graphic candy, wizards, and certainly less "covert OS upgrade components" than MS Office.

        GUI support is almost certainly a non-issue too. This is Websphere we're talking about: thin-clients, J2EE, Servlets, EJB and Web Services... that kind of stuff. If IBM chooses Applets for their GUI they should be beaten to a pulp literally, and probably will metaphorically. But that is doubtful, unless SWT is much better than it looks right now.

        They'll likely use a big, complex Web interface and just require all users to use IE or Mozilla 18.whatever (probably the later for flexibility's sake), which is certainly less than a requirement to install some other custom client OR an Office suite.

        I can already hear the complaints: "What? They force me to install a particular browser instead of a 1GB Office Suite? Oh no!". I'm just speculating, but that sounds to me like the sensible solution.

        There's a broad market of options for Web-based interfaces that work quite well if you don't have to deal with compatibility issues, your application logic is not the issue, and you have the resources to debug them properly as an application (as opposed to as 'just a website').

        This passes the GUI requirements to the browser support of whatever you're using for GUI: Javascript and DHTML works fine. Or maybe they could go for one of those new fancy XML-based 'web-app GUI' projects that one keeps hearing about in Slashdot. Or they can go the plug-in way.

        Whatever they find works best for their Websphere market, which is what matters to them here.

        • What you said makes sense. IBMs solution is useful when deploying 20,000 desktop PCs for a bank. They know that employees will only be writing short letters, for example. They want to avoid creativity. They want to avoid security risk. They want to make changes quickly.

      • A few of IBM's software successes (Score:5, Insightful)

        by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @09:39AM (#5720871) Homepage Journal
        IBM Linux is one of IBM's few software successes. I suppose that's because IBM management is not able to ruin it.

        Well, first off there is no IBM Linux. IBM doesn't have its own Linux distribution.

        As to IBM's few software successes, they include:

        • DB2, the world's #1 selling SQL database (though Oracle would no doubt like you to believe otherwise)
        • Notes and Domino, the world's #1 commercial e-mail and collaboration system (still more seats sold and deployed than Exchange)
        • WebSphere, the world's #1 selling Java application server (sorry Sun)
        • ViaVoice, award-winning voice recognition software
        • OS/400, which can run 100,000 simultaneous Notes e-mail users on one server without crashing

        I'd guess you're just a bitter OS/2 fan. Get over it.


        • IBM bought Lotus Notes and Domino, AFTER they were the most important. People use WebSphere because they want IBM support, I think, rather than because it is good software. ViaVoice is horrible compared to Natually Speaking, or at least was when I tested it.

          I should have said that IBM has not been successful with PC software. IBM does okay with its mainframe OSs. IBM does, in effect, have its own distribution of Linux. You and I don't download it because we don't have an IBM mainframe.
    • I've noticed that whatever software you look at in regards to office suites they are always playing catchup to M$. Openoffice has its own format but also produces M$ formated files. Koffice. Same story.

      The point is that people will always needs to make files compatible if they want to stand a chance against the monopoly that is M$. They will be able to say "Look their is competition" as in the real world it won't make one bit of difference.

      Unless of course we all move to XML

      Rus
    • I don't know if Microsoft is as happy as you suggest.

      The target of this seems to be a subset of Microsoft's well-publicized next target: Office applications as a network-delivered, subscription-based, package. Not the home users, who won't buy Websphere in the first place and can't afford to lose compatibility with their company's documents, but the corporations, who are Websphere clients already and also can affor to make the transition to another Office suite.

      Microsoft is moving away from retail for var
    • If anything, it bodes well for Microsoft, because it gives them another solution to point to as a competitor, dispelling claims about MSOffice being a monopoly
      Since the Judges don't care either that Micro$oft Office is a monopoly, yours is a moot point
  • It's called the HTML editing scriptlet and I've personally (with a couple of lines of ASP code and some javascript) developed a fully customized web based word processor, with Word-like toolbars and icons and such. IE has this hidden feature that is basically an integrated HTML editor; the object just needs to be called. You then put the contents of the document into a POST operation to save (natively in HTML format).

    I hear the Mozilla crew has finally been thinking about integrating this kick-ass feature.

    • Re:Uhh, this is *already* built into IE (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      crack? and lots of it

      so basically its NOT server side, which is entirely the point of what IBM has done. but oh yeah, MS never encouraged things like comprehension. so lets see, find Microsoft OS enabled thin client, oh yeah, there are not any. then run some IE active X crap and have a HTML editor, or is it a word proc, you bring up both so im not sure what are you refering to.

      you manage to compare "shitty java" with asp. hahahhaha

      asp is purely junk to begin with, but if the programmer, actually c

    • Whoring whoring whoring... (Score:4, Informative)

      by aftk2 ( 556992 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @04:23AM (#5720216) Homepage Journal
      The editor is called Midas...looks pretty cool. [mozilla.org]

    • Re:Uhh, this is *already* built into IE (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Malcontent ( 40834 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @05:19AM (#5720332)
      " It's called the HTML editing scriptlet and I've personally (with a couple of lines of ASP code and some javascript) developed a fully customized web based word processor, with Word-like toolbars and icons and such. IE has this hidden feature that is basically an integrated HTML editor; the object just needs to be called. You then put the contents of the document into a POST operation to save (natively in HTML format)."

      So you are comparing the simple little HTML editor to a full blown office right?.

  • Nice of them to go Open Source (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IBM has basically released the source of their java applications. Java is *trivial* to decompile. Names of variables, function calls etc are kept intact - you only lose comments.

    Don't believe me? Search google for "DJ's Java Decompiler"

    • Re:Nice of them to go Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sridev ( 663490 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @03:10AM (#5720021)
      Not really.

      It's possible to prevent java code from being decompiled. This can be done using Obfuscation of the code [arizona.edu] - basically converts the code so that it is more difficult to decompile (but not impossible).
      The names of the variables and functions could be changed by such a tool to make it difficult to understand a program - as if it's already not difficult to understand without any comments.
    • There's a huge difference between being able to see/modify the source and being legally able to see/modify the source.
      Decompiling proprietary Java apps is not legal.

  • Questionable benefit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shinzaburo ( 416221 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @02:54AM (#5719979) Homepage
    If this is tightly integrated with WebSphere, I can see how it would be a benefit to those who have already deployed or decided to deploy WebSphere. But without said tight integration, there's really not much benefit over using OpenOffice or some other freely available office suite. Having the apps served via the network may make it easier to deploy updates, but I still don't believe the suite is going to induce more people to buy Websphere unless it's tightly integrated and truly exceptional relative to other free alternatives.
    • But businesses will see this as an easy way to manage their user's office-suite needs centrally, AND get support from Big Blue when they need it. The guys in suits like having someone to call when things aren't working exactly right...
    • "Having the apps served via the network may make it easier to deploy updates, but I still don't believe the suite is going to induce more people to buy Websphere unless it's tightly integrated and truly exceptional relative to other free alternatives."

      It does not need to be attractive to you. IBM does not make it's money selling to mom and pop or the typical consumer. It needs to be attractive to the CIOs. I don't know how good this program is but if it can be deployed across an enterprise and then kept up

  • Java works. There's still hope for an old vision. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aquarian ( 134728 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @03:05AM (#5720007)
    Java has come a long way since the early days of Core's suite. Performance isn't an issue anymore, *especially* with IBM's SWT toolkit, a blazing alternative to Swing. IMO, one problem Sun has had is not offering enough slick, Java desktop apps. Perhaps the slickest one of all is InstallAnywhere -- something everyone uses and appreciates the slickness of, but doesn't realize that slickness is in no small part due to being written in Java. Maybe this will help get the ball rolling.

  • I wonder IBM will workin on MS Office filters (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WoTG ( 610710 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @03:12AM (#5720026) Homepage Journal
    I suspect IBM will want to be able to import MS Office files into their system... perhaps they'll share some code with the OpenOffice gang.

    The filters in OpenOffice are pretty good... but there's always going to be room for improvement. (plus, those MS file formats are a moving target...) It would be a nice bonus if IBM would open source their filters, or better yet, use the OpenOffice filters and contribute patches. I have no personal experience with recent Lotus packages, but I'm going to guess that OpenOffice filters are more advanced than the Lotus ones by now anyway.

    Personally, I'd like to see some basic VBA compatibility... say what you want about VB, but I find it very handy for little custom functions in Excel -- and no, I don't want to rewrite them just to use oO.

    Interesting co-opetition if this did happen. IBM working with a group largely supported by Sun, both trying to take a big bite out of MS.
    • "Personally, I'd like to see some basic VBA compatibility... say what you want about VB, but I find it very handy for little custom functions in Excel -- and no, I don't want to rewrite them just to use oO. "

      Yeech. Why go to all that work just to embed a crappy language. Better off embedding ruby or python or something. If compatibilty means dealing with VB then I'd rather do without it.
  • I wonder if this suite is built with IBM's SWT toolkit [eclipse.org], a quick, ultra-slick alternative to Sun's Swing.

  • makes for cheap clients (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SourceHammer ( 638338 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @03:16AM (#5720038) Homepage
    Think of servers as a fixed cost and clients as a variable cost. With thin client models you only have to support a browser on the client machines. It is the end to a management headache: all those apps configured on all those clients.

    Think about all those companies that are paying big bucks for all of those client OS's and Apps. Now they can get, for less than $200, loaded PC's (1.1 GHz PC w/Linux installed, no monitor).
    Walmarts $199.98 PC. [walmart.com]
    • Bad news buddy. This idea, specifically with respect to Java, has been had several times by many of the top companies in software. It's been a dreadful, embarassing failure every time.

      People don't want this type of client.

  • How about an MS Access alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aquarian ( 134728 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @03:22AM (#5720055)
    It could be argued there are plenty of office suites already, especially word processors and spreadsheets. However, what this huge steaming pile of free and open source officeware lacks is a real alternative to MS Access. There simply is nothing, except for some half-assed iimitators that only run on Windows themselves.

    What I'd like to see is something programmed in Java, using an embedded Java RDBMS engine such as McKoi, but also able to be used as a front end to any SQL database -- just like Access. The problem with Acces is, of course, that it only runs on Windows. Wouldn't it be groovy to have a cross-platform, true alternative?

    • Re:How about an MS Access alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Gavin ( 70 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @04:45AM (#5720261) Homepage Journal
      IBM already has a Pure Java database in Cloudscape (www.cloudscape.com). IBM acquired this nifty little toy when they brought Informix in 2001. It is an embedded database that is much more feature rich then McKoi.
    • GNU Enterprise [gnue.org].

      (one of the 3 listed overviews:)

      A set of tools, such as a data-aware user forms interface, a reporting system and an application server, which provide a development framework for enterprise information technology professionals to write or customise data-aware applications and deploy them effectively across large or small organisations. The GNUe platform boasts an open architecture and easy maintenance. It gives users a modular system and freedom from being stuck with a single-source vendor.
    • > The problem with Access is, of course, that it only runs on Windows. Wouldn't it be groovy to have a cross-platform, true alternative?

      MS Access is supposedly designed for small businesses and for small groups in big companies, but after I worked with a small company who uses MS Access to manage their customer records, I've come to conclude that any database does not belong to a small business. There is no reliable or economical way to manage any database for small (very small) business. The only alt

  • Thin client (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Sunday April 13, 2003 @03:42AM (#5720109) Homepage
    Is it me or are things going full circle with this? Firstly there was the power on the server delivered to clients, then the power moved to the clients and now its moving back to the server. I suppose its just coming back into fashion although it does make certain things like managment easier

    Also with J2EE being cross platform it should make it client independant

    Rus

    • Re:Thin client (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bm_luethke ( 253362 ) <`luethkeb' `at' `comcast.net'> on Sunday April 13, 2003 @04:20AM (#5720206)
      Yea, it is a matter of costs shifting. Bussinesses try and minimise cost. Right now, blazing fast hardware is cheap - people are not. This leads to trying to cut people costs (hence the push for centralised services - less administraotrs).

      In the early days hardware was insanely expensive. Thus having one machine capable of doing everything was needed (and it was the only machine capable of doing it). It was prohibitive to have a sun sparc 10 on everyones desk when they were new and blazing fast. Hence centralised services.

      For a while the costs have not been that much different between the two. There was no really easy way to integrate it all into one point - networks were not fast or reliable enough. I remeber running remote X windows at school and just sitting and waiting on the network to load the app. Now, I have an intensive application running in the background, some network hog (kazaa, actuall application, etc) and still get snappy x-windows. Sure it is not as fast as sitting on my machine - but it is only a matter of "feel" not actual productivity loss. Cut out the background stuff and it is hard to tell the difference. Individual productivity was higher when everyone had thier own stuff - no waiting for services to be available, no waiting on the network, etc. The cost in sysadmins was greatly offset by the productivity gains elsewhere.

      At some point we will probably shift again - maybe to something no one has thought of. Both the greatness and the suckitude of working in a fairly young industry that grows/changes as quick as we do. It reminds me of something a teacher once said. In our file processing class we went over reading sequential block devices (tape drives). The teacher said "you never know - you may one day need this". While not on a tape drive, I have needed the sequential raed algorithms a few times and was glad I had it. Some really old stuff is starting to become vogue again.
    • Things have been trynig to come 'full circle' for years now (since at least 1999), but progress keeps hitting a brick wall like a mosquito on a windshield. The main thing holding people back from this model is having extremely substantial investments in desktop hardware and software, the exhorbinant cost of replacing everything at once, and closed file formats that can't be currently read/written on the NOSes that are available.

      (hah! I didn't even have to mention MS and you -still- knew what I meant!)
  • IT managers and the solution providers supporting them will at the very least be able to use the offering as leverage to get Microsoft Office pricing down, he said.

    Well, at least he's honest!

  • good, bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ramzak2k ( 596734 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @04:00AM (#5720161)
    Good
    1. Finally it would be easier to work on WSAD and a word document opened together. Anyone who has worked with these mammoth applications opened together would know what i am talking about. By making individual PCs dummy terminals, this could free up PReciOus processor power

    2. Easier to maintain / Upgrade. The guys at the IT should definitely NOT be happy about this one. They will probably get laid off now that it is easier to upgrade due to the centralization.

    Bads
    1. The only good thing about a monopoly is the standard that it establishes. The article talks says the J2EE suite has
    "80 percent of the Office functionality most people use".
    There would now be a possibility for a doc file developed in MS Office to look different on these IBM systems. Imagine your resume getting rejected because of that !

    2. Centralization could suck with Network breakdown. Switching PCs will not work !

    • I gave up on MS Office compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Submarine ( 12319 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @04:25AM (#5720223) Homepage

      I must say I gave up mostly on the alleged compatibility of open-source software with MS Word. There was always something not right in the presentation. Most of the MS Word stuff that I receive is forms from management and outside partners; those people apparently don't know how to make PDF forms.

      We have a solution: we use rdesktop [rdesktop.org] to access a single Windows 2000 machine from our Unix desktops, and we run MS Office and Acrobat on them.

      • How many users can you support and on what kind of machine.

        My expreiments with terminal server indicate that it still needs help. Dialog boxes disappear, windows scroll at the speed of light, and people just close their terminal server leaving tons of open sessions. Oh yea that and it seems to leak memory like a sieve so that all your applications are noticeably slower in the afternoon then in the morning.
        • The clients run on Linux PCs and Solaris SparcStations.

          We have our share of problems with terminal server. Apparently, it counts currently used licenses in a weird way (perhaps that's related to what you said: sessions are not actually closed).

          We don't use it that much; just to fill forms in Word or Acrobat.

        • Dialog boxes disappear, windows scroll at the speed of light,

          Never had that experience, and I had been using Remote Windows 2000 (with, as well as without Citrix) for a good long time.

          and people just close their terminal server leaving tons of open sessions

          That's simple... There's a configuration option that allows you to automatically log-out users afther the idle-time you set. In addition, there is another option that sets how long after they disconnect that they can reconnect before their applicati

    • 1. The only good thing about a monopoly is the standard that it establishes. The article talks says the J2EE suite has "80 percent of the Office functionality most people use". There would now be a possibility for a doc file developed in MS Office to look different on these IBM systems. Imagine your resume getting rejected because of that !

      Of course, we all know that every version of MS Office produces documents that are compatible with the others...

  • The balance shifts between client and server (Score:5, Insightful)

    by panurge ( 573432 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @04:20AM (#5720209)
    As IBM very well knows. Increasingly corporates basically want identical disk images on their clients for manageability. But users still have the ability to change many local settings in Windows and then scream for help.

    As Ethernet bandwidth increases, the argument for putting the power back in the server farm gets stronger. The server farm is in a controlled environment, it's easier to manage. If you assume in a few years many corporates will have gigabit Ethernet to the desk, and simple, cheap thin clients running XPE or Embedded Linux, the IBM approach makes sense. It is also going to be cheaper for developing countries to do this from the start than to put big, expensive, rapidly obsoleting boxes on every desktop.

    To a certain extent too, it leverages the Linux strength in the server versus its perceived weakness in the desktop.

    Corporate IT should be about delivering the necessary, usable functionality to end users. Geeks often lose sight of that. Microsoft might lose sight of it. But it's IBM core business.

  • Why bother? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just let the user connect with ssh and use vi.

  • Server side word processor? WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @05:29AM (#5720348) Homepage Journal
    I mean, really. Who the hell would want that? "Look at this, its just like a regular word processor, but extra laggy!!!"

    It would definetly be a lot more laggy then a pure-java word processor, thats for sure.

  • Oracle tried a few years back (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was called project Hat-trick (4 apps). It never saw the light of day.

    On a separate note, Larry Ellison likes to make lots of predictions - has he ever been right?

  • 80% of 10% is? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eversunsoft ( 651496 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:09AM (#5720426) Homepage
    Of course I am skeptical. For one, because I have used a number of IBM software products in the past (including Websphere), that have been less than exceptional.

    I am all for the ASP model, and I really think that something like this has great potential. Esp, if I don't have to fire up Office every time I want to make a change to my .doc documents.

    My sketicism is driven by the comment

    • "...80 percent of the Office functionality most people use..."

    It's a well known fact, that most people only use something like 10% of Words features. It's also well know that marketers like to exaggerate.

    • Logicaly, they mean that they have 8% of the full featurerange in Word... I wonder what 2% features they decided to skip that we lusers use?
    • I'm not saying you're doing this but I don't understand why people criticize MS over Word's feature set.

      It's not like we don't have the processing power or ram to handle these things anymore and your not going to be running UT with a word processor in the background anyways.

      And why is it that people always think that because there are 90+ features that they have no use for, that everyone else thinks the same. It may be certain that people only use some features but everyone probably doesn't use the exact
  • There is a big change going on at the moment - wireless mobile computing. And the thing about wireless mobile computing is that you aren't always connected to the network, but you need to be able to work regardless. That's why many new apps are all getting better at working both online and offline - Microsoft's new Outlook 11 is a great example of this.

    With a thin client delivery, you MUST be on the network to work. It just doesn't cut it for the people who move around and aren't always in the office - and

    • Re:IBM are missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)

      by panurge ( 573432 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @10:31AM (#5721096)
      That's the current Microsoft argument. In effect, 10% of your workers are power users so you need to deploy a power user solution to 100% of the workforce.

      However, the great majority of workers are only mobile within site, where wireless networking is going to be continuous. And to do productive work they usually need to get resources off the network...they should not be relying on possibly obsolete versions of docs while mobile.

      In terms of data integrity, it could be highly advantageous to many corporates if many workers could not do certain things without being connected to current data feeds.

      So, I understand where you are coming from, but no MBA 101 for you.

  • Not a standard Office suite (Score:3, Informative)

    by stevenp ( 610846 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @09:53AM (#5720912)
    >> IBM Software and its Lotus Software Group have built J2EE-based spreadsheet, document and presentation graphics "applications" that will be bundled for free with the company's WebSphere portal

    At first I thought "What has a desktop Office suite to do with Java2EE, which is a server side technology?"
    In fact the slashdot story text is misleading. In the IBM announcement is used a little bit different term - "spreadsheet and word processing 'applications'", where applications is quoted. It comes from Lotus and Java2EE is involved, so it looks like a collection of collaboration tools. Most probably the documents live on the server and the office "applications" are Java thin clients that can show and edit them.
    Really nice application for Java2EE, though. What is not nice is that they have bundled the suite with the WebSphere portal, which is a beast of extreme size, both financially and technically. It may be a nice solution for "IBM only" shops, but to little use to other people.
    We can only hope that the software is not tightly coupled with WebSphere, but is generally Java2EE compatible, so it can be used with any J2EE server.

  • I think we're missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)

    by boskone ( 234014 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @01:42PM (#5722039)
    I think that where this is a bona-fide threat to MS is in changing the paradigm.

    change may take place in two ways. The first is as mentioned by some other posters, you would get centralized management of the app and be able to reduce your TCO by not having to install/upgrade on every machine.

    the second possible shift is where the real potential is. People don't just buy websphere and drop it in, they customize it to do something for them... so, now that there's going to be an office suite in websphere, companies that make customizations to websphere and have custom apps running on it can count on a standardized, cross application office suite being there that they can wrap their application around.

    I think that's where the most potential for this is to truly change things.

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