*All Things Tech & No We Won't Fix Your Computer
You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 31, 2005.
Base made an appearance yesterday and then quickly went dark. This new
Google service is going to be offering some interesting database type
services, which I am predict just from a quick look of a screen shot
that was captured may compete with Craigslist and other social
applications.
Geek News Central Revealing Links & Useful Technical Information
Here’s the screen cap
I’m guessing that poohbah figured out how to make dashed borders with css 
Say you want to put a box in the sidebar of your website with the latest posts from a collection of websites. Simple. Use RSS right?
Right, but first you need to mix the different RSS feeds into one big feed. To do this, you use an RSS mixer. (just google on that and you will find a bunch of them). I used kickrss to do this. Works great and the price is right.
Then you can use feed2js to create some nice java script that puts it on your site. Easy. As it should be.
Google throwing bodies at OpenOffice? (Duh)
October 31, 2005 in Commentary, IT by Poohbah | No comments
c|net
is reporting that Google is hiring programmers to improve OpenOffice.org.
(Duh), as it sits now it’s basically unusable. The only ones that are using it are the ones that have to or are forced to. Everyone thought it was a great idea 5 years ago when Sun turned it over to the open-source community. But since then it started to get bloated and things got worse instead of better. Of course Sun realized they alone could not take on M$.
Now a couple of weeks ago we talked about Google making an online, portal based office suite. Certainly some applications don’t lend itself so well to this but if anyone can make a go of it Google can, and this is just the first step of them warming up to the idea.
The 80/20 rule applies here as it does everywhere else. 80% of the world only uses about 20% of Microsoft Office features. So you can easily satisfy 80% of the worlds needs out of the gate by giving them a feature rich web based office experience that’s compatible but doesn’t have everything. People want everything but they don’t need it. If it’s FREE they certainly will use it.
The 20% that use the higher end wiz-bang features will never be happy with a web based experience anyway. So don’t try to solve their problems with 1.0 or even 2.0
About 80% of the documents I work with each day could easily be handled by an online office suite, if done properly, 20% can’t and probably never will.
But for the cost differential, I’m willing to bet that some organizations, a lot of organizations will find a way to deal with the 20% that will struggle.
Google Office is coming… Write it down.