In some areas, electricity is not reliable as it once was. Enron's
greed-based outages and the MS-based east coast outage are two example,
but I can think of 3 formerly high end european countries with
electricity problem (compared to the 80's). Though still it is more
reliable than network connectivity.
Either way, if the price is low enough some people may use web-based
tools for everything, but only if they are not bothered by occasional
outages. It will cross the performance/price threshold for some.
The basic problem with web-based office suites is that more parts = more
failure. www.Google.com (an arbitrary example) is between 15 and
30-something hops from my machines, depending on geographical location.
But I'll illustrate with a shorter path of 10:
If, for the sake of argument, any given node has a 99% uptime, then after
ten node it's only 90% for the whole path. If the nodes are only 98% (MS
products, lack of skill, for whatever other reason), then the complete
path of ten such nodes only has about an 82% uptime. (If my wild attempt
at stats is correct.)
That's just counting the routing, not the services themselves.
People aren't machines, they have other things going. So an interrupted
task may get delayed hours or days, and may take as much time to pick up
where it was left of as if startingfrom the beginning.
The same problem gives standalone packages like OOo a reliability
advantage over ones like the latest versions of MSO which seem to be
dependent on server-based services. The new versions of MSO, if the DRM
is fulfill it's claims, must check in with at least once with a remote
authentication and authorization service each time a key action occors:
such as creating, opening, saving, editing, printing, copying, deleting,
or mailing all or part of any given DRM'd document.
Any *technical* discussions of DRM capabilities in the press ought to
provide lots of fuel and ammunition for OOo, but that's probably why there
are no such discussions and haven't been since the issue first arose.
-Lars
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Software patents endanger the legal certainty of software.
Keep them out of the EU by writing your MEP, keep the market open.
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Ian Lynch wrote:
On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 10:03 +0000, Daniel Carrera wrote:
Ian Lynch wrote:
As it is if the electricity goes off and most people don't worry too
much about that.
Electricity is more reliable than internet connections. When internet
connections become as reliable as electricity is today, a lot more
people will be interested in web-based office.
But electricity was not always as reliable as it is to-day and people
were still reliant on it. Chicken and egg, when there is a demand for a
higher level of reliability it will happen.
50% of people are employed in
SMEs not large companies so there is a huge market to be tapped in small
companies to start with and then move up the pyramid.
You have an SME. Would you trust your entire company's documents on the
hope that Evil Edna won't go down again? When you can get OOo for free
without that risk?
Yes, if Google offered me web based services that could do all the
things the business needed at $50 a terminal I'd definitely consider
moving over. I might be a bit more careful to have a more robust caching
server and might well rent two independent broad band connections. That
would still be a big saving on costs - and we are an established IT
company. Most small businesses are crippled for hours if *anything* goes
wrong because despite paying support contracts the supporters don't
arrive immediately. New start ups don't have the same constraints. Those
are the initial markets and its a big niche that is scalable to larger
things. Chances are workers in these businesses will also take a
domestic service at home.
Perhaps a better market for Google Office would be schools (not for the
staff, for the kids). They have more reliable internet, and if the kids
can't get their homework one day, it's not the end of the world.
Except that schools are much more dependent on media based things. Its a
common mistake to think of schools as a less demanding market. In many
ways they are more demanding and more complex. However, I think there
would be potential take up there too.
You need to look for customers who won't mind not being able to access
their files for one day.
Why if you provide them with a backup connection? Its about £25 a month
for our 2 meg ADSL connection so doubling that cost is not prohibitive.
The only example I can think of is a school
network for the kids. Even a student (e.g. my brother) wouldn't go for a
web-based office because it could mean that his homework is late. But at
a school, if it goes down, it goes down for everyone, so the teacher
would extend the due date.
You can't guarantee kids have a computer or Internet connection at home.
Most do, but even if one or two don't you can't insist on them doing
homework that requires a computer - against the law on Equal Opps
grounds here. If the school says the kid has to have something they then
have to provide it. In fact a very low cost connection would make it
possible to ensure all kids did have the tools at home.
For it to be worthwhile doing it, Google doesn't have to have the whole
market immediately they just need a significant niche immediately and
then to be able to develop it upwards. In any case there are ways of
caching stuff on a local machine if there was a connection problem.
Saving some basic files to a RAM disc is no big deal and with RAM prices
continuing to fall, having a local workspace with say OOo embeded into
the machine in ROM with the OS is not impossible either, ok it wouldn't
be web based office but really the concept is more about low cost low
maintenance terminals provided as part of a service. Exactly how the
technology is distributed between the terminal and the server isn't that
important as long as it can be made to work.
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