Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents.
Microsoft calls its Lego blocks Fluid components, and they can be edited in real time by anyone in any app. The idea is that you could create things like a table without having to switch to multiple apps to get it done, and the table will persist on the web like a Lego block, free for anyone to use and edit.
This is quite awesome, but I hope Microsoft won’t be tying functionality like this to its Chromium-based browsers, leaving others in the dust.
Sounds like OpenDoc?
That’s the first thing I thought of also.
I had high hopes for OpenDoc, but of course the hardware of the time couldn’t handle the overhead well (among other problems). I still think there’s value in the concept (without the “everything on the web” angle that Fluid seems to be centered around).
It reminds me a bit on an office, that I have seen 10 or 20 years ago.
It was an proprietary, commercial office. I think it beguns with “E” in its name.
There it was possible to mix spreadsheets, word processor and presentation in one document.
At that time I thought it is really visionary and the future. But I don’t read anything about the company anymore.
Then I have looked at the lists of office suites on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_office_suites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites
and being surprised, that this visionary software isn’t mentioned there.
Seems not as visionary as I thought.
Ok, I have remembered the name. Its RagTime Office.
It still exists. And it seems really, that it is isn’t no longer anywhere mentioned. If you don’t search for the specific name, you don’t will finding it.
theuserbl,
I’m not familiar with this product, but the way these things often go is that a no-name company can build a product and never manage to break into the market, but a big brand can take the same product and succeed on reputation alone. It’s the rockstar effect. You could have a celebrity, sports icon, or youtube star with a critical following face off against a highly trained product expert, and the celebrity would get far more sales. This kind of sucks for those of us who are experts, haha.
Isn’t this just reinventing what they had in the Windows 3.1 era with OLE, but for the web?
OLE still exists in modern Windows, and even that was based on Xerox PARC documents concepts, brought into Microsoft by some of the people that worked on them a Xerox PARC and were part of the original Word team.
I think you misunderstood my intend due to poor phrasing.
I should have changed “they had in” to “they’ve had since”.
So, Microsoft discovered a “reason” to force people upgrade from Office 2007?
Maybe now we will get spell checking as you type in Excel. Though it might be the other way around. I wonder sometimes if MS decision makers actually use their own products. Probably on their iPhones all the time barking instructions to coders who don’t need spreadsheets either .. because they can write a program faster.
Awesome! I’ve always wanted a word document that had embeded spreadsheets and graphs that won’t work without an internet connection. It’ll be perfect and I can forsee absolutely no problems with this approach.
**sarcasm*