I'm here today to talk about the future of computing. It's maybe somewhat ironic, or maybe somewhat telling, that I am doing this from the oldest computer I own. For the past several years, I've been steadily buying, reviewing, re-reviewing, using, and generally playing with as many "modern" computing devices as I could possibly get my hands on. I have at least one of each an iOS, Windows, and Android tablet, and I've readily embraced the tablet lifestyle.
Sort of. Truth be told, I stopped buying new tablets when the Microsoft Surface RT came out, and allowed me to revert from using tablet applications that store all of their data on unknown servers I don't control.
That said, I am here to talk to you today about the future: I wrote this entire post in my web browser. How futuristic is this? It depends on which hairs you want to split. Netscape included a web page authoring component in the 1990s, but this text was actually written on a web page: The Microsoft Office Word Online application.
When people start talking about "cloud computing" or modern software distribution programs such as Office365 and Adobe Creative Cloud, they immediately begin to talk about a horrible version of the future where all of your applications run out of a web browser and your local computer turns into a brick if you don't always have reliable access to a very fast Internet connection.
In the real world, it turns out that this is pretty far form the truth. Office365 and Adobe Creative Cloud are really both about new ways to license and distribute software applications. The neat thing about both programs is that they've created an environment where end users can more easily license the software for a higher number of computers, and it's easier to move licensing from computer to computer, because as a necessary part of the idea of signing into your software, there's tools to manage what computers are licensed to use the software.
The other neat aspect of this, for both Microsoft's and Adobe's offerings, is that they give you access to online storage. Microsoft OneDrive will let you synchronize files from Microsoft's servers to your own computers, and is being positioned for tasks such as backup and archive of media files in addition to just Office documents.
But what about writing reports and assembling financial analyses in the cloud? Until recently, Microsoft had two options for this: First, you could "stream" the Microsoft Office desktop applications, which was extremely bandwidth-heavy because you were downloading an entire copy of whatever particular application you wanted to use and running it locally on your system. I continue to disbelieve just how inefficiently Microsoft ran that aspect of the service, and likely for that exact reason, it's no longer an option. The other option, which has been around for a very long time now, is to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote in your web browser. Until recently, the last time I looked at this option was several years ago. A lot has changed since then.
Traditionally, Microsoft Word is an incredibly powerful program, with a lot of features for a variety of specific markets. I don't have to spend too much time talking about it, but it has all sorts of things, such as a citation manager, footnotes and endnotes, and you can use styles and headers to organize a document. In a lot of ways, it has the power to replace old and powerful text processing systems.
For most people, however, Word is about producing short bodies of styled text with very specific formatting. I would be completely unsurprised if most Word usage worldwide is for documents short enough that the author has decided it is more efficient to manually control the formatting and manage their sources, rather than using Word's powerful but sometimes cumbersome functionality.
With that in mind, I recently started wondering what Word Online was like these days. I tried it out a few years ago at a time when it was still not as good as Google Docs at being a word processor in a web browser, and have mostly left it alone, especially with academic-focused Office and Office365 licensing having such good pricing, and of course because I haven't needed that sort of functionality for a while, with my Surface RT.
I first tried it when I had the ChromeBook back in 2010. At the time, it supported very little functionality, and was best thought of as a supplement to WordPad that lived in your web browser. It worked, but the ChromeBook was a very slow computer, and at the time, finding WiFi networks in public was a much more difficult task than it is today. At the time, though, I was very excited for the existence of the Office Web Apps, because it meant I could use OneNote on my Mac, and later on the Chromebook.
I later went all-in on SkyDrive (later OneDrive) for syncing my documents, but spent most of my time using the desktop Office applications to manipulate my data. After that, I switched to an on-premise SharePoint server, which has worked well for my Windows computers that have Office 2010 or 2011 installed. While using the SharePoint server, productivity strategy for my Macs, Linux computers, and non-Windows tablets has been not to use them for productivity.
The functionality of Office Online has advanced significantly in the past few years. Starting off, it was barely any better than Google Documents, with the main advantage being that when using Office Online, you can retain your document file format and edit the files using a local copy of Office on any computers that have them, or using the web site when you're on somebody else's computer, accessing your SkyDrive/OneDrive on the web.
Today, Office Online looks a lot more viable, both in terms of what you can do with it, and in terms of just using it as your primary word processor. Now that I'm no longer actively writing academic papers, it probably does everything I need out of Word, except for that one thing. Fortunately, I only need "that one thing" at the end of my documents' life, when I go to publish them on my blog.
This is my spacebar heating.
Regardless, I spent some time in the Word Online application, in a few different browsers and on a few different computers. By and large, I came away with a positive impression of it. It works well on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. It even works well in (desktop) Internet Explorer on the Surface RT.
Having Office available in the browser is valuable for a few different reasons. The best reason I can think for using the Office Web Apps is near-universal access. The experience is the same on all modern web browsers using all modern desktop platforms. Because the data is hosted by Microsoft, it's a lot more likely to be resilient than files stored on a local disk, especially for people who don't have the interest in or wherewithal to back up their data, and you can get access to the data from any computer with an Internet connection and a modern web browser. (For example, I have attempted to type this article on as many computers as possible, including a few Linux systems and several Macintoshes, plus my usual stable of Windows machines of various ages and performance levels.)
The functionality is what I'd call "mostly" there. The presentation of documents is more true to what you'll get out of Word 2010, 2011 or 2013 on a Windows or Macintosh than it was when Word Web App was new back in 2010, and I suspect that today it's a lot more viable for most people to use as their primary word processor, both for the accuracy of the presentation of the document, and for the functionality.
Today, Word Online (as it is now called) has more formatting options, and they work better. In addition, the app has taken a Google-like approach to continuous saving, which wasn't present in the original version. The functionality it has picked up includes things like the ability to edit page headers, better control over styles, better built-in find and replace, plus page layout and reviewing functionality. Word Web App also now allows co-authoring and has most, if not all of desktop Word's commenting functionality, although it doesn't get Word's change tracking functioning, meaning you'll still have to use the desktop program for more advanced versioning and collaboration.
The biggest problems with the Word Online application are related to connectivity and the performance of the application. I tried it out on two of my oldest and slowest computers: nachibes (the source of the Windows 7 screenshot) and umea (a Windows 10 Tech Preview machine.) Nachibes has a 1.3GHz Pentium M and 1.5 gigabytes of memory. Umea has a 1.8GHz Celeron M, and 4 gigabytes of memory. The reason I point this out is because the Word Web App is very heavy on memory. While Word 2010 or 2013 might use about 20-50 megabytes of memory when running and using a moderately complicated document, Word Web App has the ability to use over 270 megabyes of memory, for each tab you have open.
What this means for me is that if nachibes has no problems managing one or two Word documents and an instance of OneNote plus a few Internet Explorer tabs under normal circumstances, moving to the Word and OneNote Online applications might pose a significant problem for memory usage.
The other systems I tried Word Online on all worked well. My MacBook Pro handled the site in a recent version of Safari very well. Probably the only real issue I had was that in Firefox on Linux, the background of the document appears gray instead of white. It's still fast and it still otherwise displays accurately. Word Online is helped tremendously by having a powerful computer, which is somewhat ironic given its status as a tool to help enable to universal access to Office. Regardless, it may become how I use Office on my Macs, simply because I almost never use Office there anyway, and it's almost easier to put a document on OneDrive than it is to update a local application I almost never use.
It also makes sitting at a Linux system or a Chromebook that much more viable for me, because in SharePoint or Office Online, I can simply work my documents in the web browser.
This talks to two issues. First: web content is more complicated now than it ever has been before, and if you wanted to build a web site that was going to make a web browser look like a total hog, then making a web site that's a fully featured word processor or digital notebook is your best starting point.
Office Online is definitely a better experience when you have a fast, low-latency Internet connection, and a fast computer. It feels wrong to use a web-based word processor on a quad-core computer with eight or more gigabytes of memory, but that is where Word Online shows its stuff and never falters. As you move to lower end computers, older computers, and when you go home to work on your slow DSL or your congested cable, you start to see just how futuristic the idea of a web-based Office suite that stores all of your information in the cloud really is, for most people.
If I asked my friends to give up Office, OpenOffice, and iWork, they would probably be by and large okay with it, in terms of functionality. Office Online does what they need to do, even when they're writing academic papers and dealing with the biggest and most complicated documents that they have. The thing that would create pushback would almost certainly be related to the performance of "the app" (their Internet connections) in the evening when everybody in their neighborhood is watching Netflix, and being outright unable to work if their network goes down or if they take their laptop somewhere that does not have free WiFi.
Secondly: and this hearkens back to something I mentioned at the very beginning of this post: We're seeing more and more computer usage move to the web browser. If for no other reason than to prove the point, I typed most of this post in Google Chrome, with secondary windows dedicated to browsing and research, media playback (using the Spotify web player and loading YouTube videos) and the resource usage on this particular workflow is very different than if I'd been using Word locally and iTunes to play music. As I write this particular section of the review, I'm using a laptop that was very high end six years ago, and it really only sort of holds up to this workflow today. Tablets get around this issue by taking relatively strict control of the resources on the system, aggressively killing off web browser tabs, only allowing one open document at a time, and standardizing how the system handles multimedia, but on a desktop, it's not hard to let the resource usage get completely out of control. The Spotify web player is a beast of a Flash application, for example.
The connectivity issue is probably the biggest challenge to using true cloud-based productivity software, such as Word Online. At home, I have a very slow Internet connection and although it works well, loading documents and loading new instances of the application's interface is problematic. It ultimately works after a few moments of waiting for Word. I recently tried to access my OneNote notebooks via OneNote online, and on some friends' insanely congested cable line, what I found out was that although my data ultimately made it in, there's some very odd stuff going on with the OneNote web application, at least if you use it on a network connection with low speeds and high latency. I later went home to find that OneNote had created no fewer than eight "conflict" pages, which meant that it created a change that it couldn't figure out how to integrate with my notebook. That change? One extra blank line between two sections.
The other biggest challenge facing Office Online is the sheer impracticality and irony of it. While jotting down some thoughts about it as a service, one of the things I noted is that Office Online could be a great alternative to free Office 365 for purchasers of various inexpensive systems that do not include that license. However, the biggest problems for portable users is access to a network, and even though it's arguably The Future(TM) it still strikes me as slightly ironic for users of Windows/Mac/Linux desktops. This is probably why one of the most popular "cloud" applications to date is synchronized file services that allow you access to your data while your computer doesn't have access to the Internet.
Even though the experience of using it is so much better than it was four years ago when it was new, I still question exactly what Office Online is for. Microsoft doesn't seem to be interested in promoting it as an inexpensive or free way to get access to the Office suite. It simply seems to be there as something you happen to get with OneDrive and Office365, as a complement to those services. It has some problems preventing it from being really useful as a way to fill in the Office gap for computers you don't want to license, and of course it relies on your information being in OneDrive in the first place, which will be a shift for some people.
I can see why Microsoft continues to improve it though: People are doing more and more in their web browsers, as computing horsepower increases to allow it and as network connectivity improves to make it a better experience, people are seeing less difference between local computing experiences, and those that are on the web. One day, the connectivity issues will be resolved, and cloud applications accessed via the web browser will have a longer track record, and I think at that point we'll see greater adoption, not only of the overall service, but the web-specific components of them.
To bring it back to the first line: how is this the future of computing? I wrote the post on a six year old laptop, and the Office Online apps have themselves existed for almost five years now. At the time, I was annoyed with their performance and with the limited reach of Silverlight. Today, HTML5 is ubiquitous and network connections are far better. Not as good as they could be, but better. We're already much of the way to a phase in computing where on a desktop-experience computer, new users go to the web to find and do things before they turn to local resources. "Information" was probably one of the first things to move onto the web – Encarta (last published in 2008/2009) and other CD-ROM encyclopedias were probably the first piece of local computer software to completely go away in favor of information on the web, or information from the web, accessed via a specialized interface (such as Wikipedia apps for Windows' modern interface, and iPhone and iPad.)
The newest computer users also default to communication in their web browsers, and the newest communication services don't even have dedicated clients for desktop platforms. I think we're reaching a point where new computer users won't have this context that a desktop application should be their first stop in order to complete a chore. At some point, new computer users likely won't think about creating a document on their computer, and then saving it to their disk or to a local directory structure, and then on Friday evening, make a backup copy of everything on their computer. Instead, they'll be trusting that the providers of the services and software they want to use are competent to both provide the software and store the data that it generates.
There's a whole can of worms to be had in the idea of users relinquishing control, but that's a can of worms I might write about later. I think by the time we see a massive number of people start to use services in that way, we'll start to see what web-based services prove themselves to be long-lasting and which ones don't.
That's what I have about Office Word Online. I really just wanted to gather a few impressions and screenshots of it and put them somewhere. I also have some more thoughts about Office licensing, which I am going to collect and publish at a later date.