Comment by sourcegrift
2 years ago
I was at MS in 2008 September and internally they had a very beautiful and well functioning Office web already (named differently, forgot the name but it wasn't sharepoint if I recall correctly, I think it had to do something with expense reports?) that would put Google Docs to shame today. They just didn't want to cannibalize their own product.
Microsoft demoed Office Web Apps in 2008 L.A PDC it seems: https://www.wired.com/2008/10/pdc-2008-look-out-google-docs-...
Don't forget they also invented XHR (aka fetch) in 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
Kind of, using it became known as "AJAX" and it took many many years (and the addition of promises to JS) before the more sophisticated "Fetch API" became available.
Even then usage of AJAX declined rather slowly as it was so established, and indeed even now it's still used by many websites!
1 reply →
Funny, I asked Google Bard to guess what the actual product name was from the comment.
"It was probably Office Web Apps. It was a web-based office suite that was introduced in 2008. It included Word Web App, Excel Web App, Powerpoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. It was not SharePoint, but it was based on SharePoint technology."
Does bard browse the web yet? Is it possible it read the parent comment?
Wild that we have to ask these questions.
Don’t forget that McAfee was delivering virus scanning in a browser in 1998 with active x support, TinyMCE was full wysiwyg for content in the browser by 2004, and Google docs was released in 2006 on top of a huge ecosystem of document solutions and even some real-time co-authoring document writing platforms.
2008 is late to the party for a docs competitor! Microsoft got the runaround by Google and after Google launched docs they could have clobbered Microsoft which kind of failed to respond properly in kind, but they didn’t push the platform hard enough to eat the corporate market share, and didn’t follow up with a share point alternative that would appeal to the enterprise, and kind of blew the opportunity imo.
I mean to this day Google docs is free but it still hasn’t unseated Word in the marketplace, but the real killer app that keeps office on top is Excel, which some companies built their entire tooling around.
It’s crazy interesting to look back and realize how many twists there were leading us to where we are today.
Btw it was Office Server or Sharepoint Portal earlier (this is like Frontpage days so like 2001?) and Microsoft called it Tahoe internally. I don’t think it became Sharepoint until Office 365 launched.
The XMLHTTP object launched in 2001 and was part of the dhtml wave. That gave a LOT of the capabilities to browsers that we currently see as browser-based word processing, but there were efforts with proprietary extensions going back from there they just didn’t get broad support or become standards. I saw some crazy stuff at SGI in the late 90s when I was working on their visual workstation series launch.
Google Apps have several other problems as well.
1. Poor Google Drive interface makes managing documents difficult.
2. You cannot just get a first class Google Doc file which you can then share with others over email, etc. Very often you don’t want to just share a link to a document online.
3. Lack of desktop apps.
NetDocs was an effort in 2000/2001 that is sometimes characterized as a web productivity suite. There was an internal battle between the Netdocs and Office groups, and Office won.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/netdocs-microsofts-net-poster-...
https://www.eweek.com/development/netdocs-succumbs-to-xp/
>I was at MS in 2008 September and internally they had a very beautiful and well functioning Office web already
So why did they never release that and went with Office 365 instead?
They did, it was called Office Online with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SkyDrive (later OneDrive). Everything got moved under the Office 365 umbrella because selling B2B cloud packages (with Sharepoint, Azure AD, Power BI, Teams, Power Automate) was more lucrative than selling B2C subscriptions.
Classic innovator’s dilemma!
Interesting how it seems like MS may have been right this time? They were able to milk Office for years, and despite seeming like it might, Google didn't eat their lunch.
People still email word docs around. It’s nuts. Maybe Exchange is smart enough to intercept them and say “hey use this online one instead”? At least for intra-org..
3 replies →
More like the Acquirer's dilemma.
Google Analytics - acquired 2004, renamed from Urchin Analytics
Google Docs - acquired 2004, renamed from Writely
Youtube - acquired 2005
Android - acquired, 2005 (Samsung have done more to advance the OS than Google themselves)