I have a dislike of Microsoft. That feeling is based on over twenty years of experience with working with their operating systems, their office applications and their compilers. But recently the company is starting to impress me and the potential of their Web Apps is one of the reasons of my mellowing. Their Word Web App is a very promising solution for scientists who want to work on documents simultaneously with a number of colleagues. However my tests here show that the Web Apps still suffer from a lot of start-up problems. My conclusion is that the capability of working simultaneously on real-world documents is not yet available.

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In my previous post I discussed a feature I would like to be implemented by slide-sharing services. I am not going to repeat here all the arguments why slide sharing is useful for scientists. I just want to discuss the present quality of the engines used by these services. I consider here SlideShare, authorSTREAM, SlideBoom and Google Docs from the point of view of scientists. Two years ago I pointed out to you that SlideBoom was by far the best. After two years much could have been changed in a world where nowadays everything on the Internet is about sharing.

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Ten years years ago the major computer company Sun  Microsystems advertised in all media with the slogan: “The network is the computer”. And I must admit they knew where they were talking about. They saw the clouds coming. Sun has been taken over by Oracle in 2009.

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