Jon Udell, in Beyond office document formats, speaking of office-suite software like Word and OpenOffice Writer, voices a dream that I’ve heard time after time: “A mere fraction of the power of these multihundred-megabyte behemoths suffices for basic communication; the rest is overhead. Software delivered as a service through the Web—simple, lightweight, and universally available—is clearly the better way forward.” Well, yeah, but... authoring software is hard. I’ve used a lot of different programs over the years, and written some myself, and I’ve never seen software, designed for use by human authors, that has good usability and isn’t a great big honking monster. And usually, they’re not only big, but they take years and years to get working properly. So I really hope Jon’s right, but I’m not holding my breath. [Update: David Berlind is pointing in the same direction. I hope he’s right, too.] [Update: Jon follows up.]
