Microsoft building smaller Office
"Microsoft first demonstrated Office Designer in October at an industry convention. The company had touted the tool as enabling developers to "create and customize interactive, Web-based collaborative applications that teams can use to communicate and work together more effectively." Applications developed using Office Designer were supposed to be able to run online or offline, using the Local Web Storage System."
Offline support, uptime and responsiveness are some of the biggest problems related to web apps (you have to admit Office 2000 running on top of Win2K is more stable than most of them, if only because of the unpredictable QoS on the web.) It’s a shame the tools used by everyone won’t get us there anytime soon.
12/31/00 update: Exchange users don’t seem too happy with some features not making it into Outlook 10 either.
Speaking of web apps, there has to be a better solution to security than using the sluggish https (how many sites use hardware acceleration? Is it any good?) Idrive has a widget to integrate your account with your desktop, but it’s too slow to be useful (even through a decent ADSL connection.)
