Re: DocView now supports OpenDocument & MS Office formats

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > That is the general definition of SaaS, which I already know.

Sorry; your question was somewhat vague, and the post that prompted it
was more so.  (Most vague of all are my colleagues, who don't yet
agree on what the economic meaning of "service" is in this context.
Probably that's who I was responding to. :-)

 >     I don't know what Oracle is planning for OOo, perhaps turning
 >     the redisplay into an arm's-length client, perhaps rewriting it
 >     to target Web2.0 technology instead of local GUIs.
 > 
 > That seems like a plausible guess.

As vague as it is, that's generous of you -- but I'll accept it as
praise. :-)  FWIW, my assessment is that Oracle will continue to
support OOo as free software, possibly at levels similar to Sun, and
for the same reasons: holding Microsoft at bay, and to some extent a
loss-leader/ad platform for their SaaS products.  In parallel they'll
develop the SaaS aspect for producing nice reports, presentations, and
customer-manipulable spreadsheets as a front-end for other services.

Also FWIW, I just tasked a team of students with a research project to
study SaaS in East Asia.  It's off-topic so I won't say more on-list,
but since the thread has gotten this far, let me say I'd be happy to
take input (offlist) from anyone interested who has suggestions about
what to look for or what's interesting to them about SaaS as a
business model (they're MBAs, not SEs).  As yet, my students have
barely learned to expand the acronym, so they'd be happy to get
suggestions too!

Regards and a Happy, Productive 2011 to all Emacsers!