Saturday October 08, 2005

At the joint Sun/Google announcement, reporters, analysts and end users alike were hoping to hear about OpenOffice delivered as a web service. As a disclaimer, I know about as much about the google/Sun announcement as the rest of you. I watched the announcement and that's about it. Don't read anything in to this blog entry beyond nostalgia.

Does anyone remember StarPortal?, AKA the Sun One Webtop? George does. George basically asks "What does it mean to deliver OpenOffice as a web service?" and, in an agreeably dubious manner, asks proponents to actually use such solutions.

I remember StarPortal very, very well. In fact, I went off to internal training on it. It was really cool. Here is a presentation that has a couple of slides on StarPortal, not to mention the "We are the Dot in Dot COM" :) What StarPortal did very well was deliver content based on the capability of the device the user had access to. I took the liberty of installing all N tiers on one of my servers. StarPortal contained a user document repository where I kept many of my presentations. What was cool was that I could log in and deliver presentations (or read documentation) pretty much where ever I was. StarPortal had a Java front end (not back end) to render in a GUI in a browser. It also generated a PDF on-the-fly from that same content. Don't have PDF? How about generate HTML? Don't have a web browser? That is where it got really cool.

Back then I had a wireless Palm VII (circa 1999-2000). From the Palm I could render the simple content (I can't recall the details). The primary value was being able to email or fax the document to the closest devices so that content could then be presented. It really was cool and, more importantly, usable (although it did need some attainable work).

It is for these reasons that I somewhat disagree with George that that StarPortal was an utter failure. I think that is overstated. Technology was not the problem, IMHO. Is it something users wanted? With the dot-bomb, we never really found out. So I'll ask myself George's question if I would eat my own dogfood in the case of StarPortal. I actually think I would. Bandwidth and JVM improvements will have made the experience that much better. As you probably know, I'd prefer to go whole-hog and put the entire desktop over the web, albeit with an ultra-thin SunRay instead of the Wyse terminal George talks about (thin is relative). Someday.