[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Enterprises Will Likely Ignore MS Office Web Apps, Says Researcher here

[rasmasyean]

Web tools suck still at this stage for most serious usage in enterprise.

What you need is a combination of desktop and web tools that intertwine.

I suppose Microsoft saw this and established themselves to entrench businesses in their products.

It will take a lot more than "cheap tools" to take people off the Office Cycle.

[chrisseanhayes]

I don't think people will be quick to jump on any 'online' Office Apps. They have NO interoperative ablility. If they have data integration it's super difficult to implement (or sloppy). The people in enterprise environments who use office apps need both of these. And totally neglecting the macro/programming functionality. I know only a small portion of users use these but those people would be totally out and anyone using their tools.

[jazzy5]

Enterprises are well aware of one large problem with web services and application. It is call Murphy law. The moment a company needs access to their data or aplication thru the web it will be the day it will be down. How upsetting is for people when Hot Mail, Gmail and any other web service goes down for whatever reason. Will I submit my critical information and program to a web site that can be crash as easy as taking a lollipop from a baby? IT department talks about security, availability, etc. This will be an area where IT will not have control of the software.

[rasmasyean]

Well, although I don't think this transition will happen "soon", but...
They solved some of those issues. I think there is a recent defense spring-off (probably apocalyptic scenario planning like the internet's origins) that liscenses "distributed storage" technology. Your data is split into like 20 parts and scattered all over the place. But you only need like 7 random parts to reconstruct it and decrypt it. Those aren't exact numbers, but just a simple illustration.
As for one potential advantage of the cloud regarding applications, you can potentially use high petra-flop resources to perform your space suttle re-entry applications and stuff like that. But more down-to-earth, you can imagine that the current work in Natural Language Processing, might make it too slow for your computer to access tremendous databases and compute what you "want". Like there may be 100 ways to ask your computer for the weather forecast but instead of having to say "Start Listening Computer: <beep> Weather Forcast <beep...Today's forcast is blah...Master>. You can just talk naturally to your computer and the "cloud" will process your query with a supercomputer and try to give you what you want...and even remeber your habits and try to remind you to take medicine, etc.