My little forecast: I think that in less than one year there will be a Suite Office usable “inside” your browser, entirely written in Javascript and AJAX, using the DOM model of XHTML.
UPDATE: AjaxOffice is now on sourceforge.
UPDATE My office mate told me that there are already many Free Software HTML text editors such as FckEditor, TinyMCE (longer list at HTMLArea). So I guess we just need Google (or Yahoo!) to provide the service and the possibility to store files on their disks. END OF UPDATE
Many usable pieces are already there (usually as Free Software javascript libraries): toolbar, menubar, drag-and-drop, edit-in-place, window, resize images.
What is peculiar is that
– writing this suite is not too complicated
– there are so many people (thousands or more) with enough skills for easily doing it
Using “release early, release often” phylosophy and a Free Software licence (such as GPL), we could have a big number of hackers working all together at the “Ajax Office”, adding functionalities, correcting bugs, …
You can easily imagine that having a reliable Office Suite that works inside your browser is a great opportunity for normal users (who will need Microsoft Office? but also OpenOffice…).
But you can also imagine having Google (or Yahoo! or another big player) offering the Ajax Office interface AND the ability to keep your files on their disks and access/modify/print them from every computer in the world just via a browser. And not having to bother with backups. Similar to what happens now with Gmail (almost infinite storage for your emails and the ability to access it via any computer just with a browser). Jeremy already thinks that Gmail is faster and better than Thunderbird (desktop email program). I think one of its next posts will be “Ajax Office (or Goffice) is better than Microsoft Office (and OpenOffice)”. [Oh yes, there are huge privacy issues.]
Anyway that would be killer! A totally new way to use computers and the web. And I want to see Microsoft shares that day! I’m just dreaming or is it a reasonable forecast? My bet is for the second. So, I see you here in less than one year.



