“A man with a clock knows what time it is, a man with two clocks
is never sure. So goes the proverb, but today it needs another
clause: What about the man with a watch on his wrist and another
clock that’s set by a hosted service?”
“…initiatives such as Sun’s StarOffice have been billed as
much for their potential as hosted services as for their role in
lowering application prices by challenging the hegemony of
Microsoft Office. Microsoft and Sun, not to mention others, both
believe that word processing can become a hosted service — perhaps
one that people will rent by the “feature hour,” to create a new
unit analogous to the watt-hour used for billing by electrical
power utilities. Presumably, this mode of delivery is meant to give
people only as much as they want, at a price they’ll willingly
pay.”
“…StarOffice has been released in Open Source format, a move
that provoked much discussion of the intricacies of open-source
licensing before the code became available this week. At the same
time, moreover, StarOffice has become the software bundle of choice
for Linux distributors — bringing me back to my opening thought
about the man with two clocks. We’ve seen that even something
as simple as setting our clocks can’t reliably be handed off to a
service… The local option is good enough — just as free
StarOffice, running on free Linux, installed on an inexpensive PC,
may soon make hosted word processing seem like more trouble than
it’s worth.”