Google believes it can help OpenOffice–perhaps working to pare down the software’s memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size, said Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at the search company….”We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better,” DiBona said.
This is a step further than the Sun/Google alliance announced a few weeks back. Once it’s good enough, will it then get tossed onto the Google Grid, alongside, say, Earth and Talk? Why not? Even though that idea was pooh-poohed by Sergey at Web 2, I’m not convinced. Once productivity apps are as good as Office and served in some kind of neat client/server execution, well, I for one would be tempted to switch. I hate, hate, HATE working with Word and PPT on the Mac. So many clearly obvious and never addressed bugs. (Excel, so far, has been OK).
Perry, in a comment to the Google Base post, makes the astute observation that to date, Google has never really been seen as the destination or the application, more like the switchboard. A successful implementation of OO could change that….
Don’t assume Google wants to release a desktop OpenOffice edition – they may simply want to use the file format converters on the server side, for GMail, Search or one of their other services.
Having said that, why is there a Firefox team at Google?
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/pinkerton/archives/008843.html
every time read i about google and how important the mafor is for online business, but why not use the people msn? it works better and it is stressless.
many people don’t use msn cause it is a microsoft site?
I think yahoo ist still better, less spammer like on G.
MSN is now very good too. G. have to much power.
I think in some years every niche have his own search engine, the big one can not cover all search and the results are only more and less.
G is the only s.e. were a page can get brilliant results without doing anything for it^^ For good success only the users are important, not the s.e. Know what I mean… 🙂
Google is not as good it was before, sure they want to keep seo’s out of the first positions, but now you always find the same pages like wikipedia, and other “autority sites” but the really nice small sites with good niche content you never find.
I think google is stille the best engine. But i also agree with that, that in future there will be more Spezialized-Engines
I fully agree to Robson, but I think something has to change to come more independet from the “google brain”