If I Was Scott McNealy and Had Responsibility for Open Office!

I just downloaded Open Office, formerly Star Office and using it for a bit has made me seriously think about what I'd do if I was responsible for Star Office.  Here's what I'd do:

1. Buy a bunch of Windows 2000 servers.
2. Buy a bunch of copies of Office 2000 or Office XP.

What????  Are you insane?  Nope!  Here's step #3.

3.  Build a web application for file conversion that returns viewable files. Read on...

The single biggest barrier for Open Office, bar none, is the Office File Formats issue.  These formats are proprietary, poorly documented at best and huge issue for users -- if they can't open documents, they really can't use Open Office.  And, despite years of efforts, Open Office still doesn't have good format support.  And, no, they're not dumb -- this is a hard problem.

So, here's my solution:

1. There are two basic problems for people with office documents: View and Save
2. The single best tool for viewing and saving office documents is, ta da!, Office.
3. Office is fully programmable via Visual Basic for Applications and COM objects.
4. Build a web application with Email, Soap, XML-RPC, CGI and Web form interfaces that:
   • Accepts an Office document via one of these interfaces
   • Calls Office and has Office do a conversion either to another binary format like RTF or to an HTML version (Office 2000 and XP really do create good HTML -- it may be viewable best under Internet Explorer but these are the people you are trying to get out of Office anyway)
   • Have Office provide the results back to the requesting interface.
5. Here's a real world example:
   • Bill gets a Word .DOC file emailed to him but he's scared of viruses, etc so he emails it to view@leaveoffice.org or view@viewdotdoc.com or some damn address at some damn domain
   • The system grabs it, feeds it to a conversion pipeline that renders it has HTML and pops him a reply saying "Here's a url to it: dddd.htm" (this url should be long and complex so it can't be easily guessed for obvious security reasons).
   • It also lets him configure an option so that these can be returned to him automatically via HTML email in the future
   • Finally it uses Office to save that file as RTF which Open Office does a good job with.
   • Or it might save that file to PDF if Sun wanted to ally with Adobe and then provide that file back to the user
6. If Sun wants to make money from this, it feels like this is actually a useful web service that could be free for personal use and for fee for business / volume use.  Restricting by IP address could be a really useful billing tool that is easy to implement.

See, doesn't it make sense that Sun should buy Windows 2000 Servers and copies of Office?

Seriously, this is a very workable proposal and an easy thing to implement.  I'd love to have it for myself but I need to make a living right now.  If anyone wants to take this on, I'm happy to kibitz, discuss or manage the effort but I can't do this one for free...

NOTE: While I honestly didn't write this as a blatant grab for business, I should point out that my consulting company, www.fuzzygroup.com, does have the skills and time to build this if anyone out there wants this.  We've done lots and lots of web development including handling and parsing of mime encoded attachments (using both Perl and PHP), VBA and COM programming (an new product based on VBA that adds directly into Office to ship soon), systems design of large scale NT server networks (80 + servers hosted at Exodus) and internal work on web services.

© Copyright 2002 The FuzzyStuff. Last update: 5/9/2002; 6:51:36 AM.