Excel and word on the web

Jotspot live, provides with collaboration tools like wiki, calendar, maps and excel on the web. One nice feature is one can copy based excel sheets from desktop and start working with them on the fly.

"Combine this baby with JotLive or Writely and not only are you this close from being liberated from Microsoft Office", says Steve Rubel on his blog."

Find it difficult to share his optimism about this, since there is a long way to go before online versions of excel and word can be usable in real time. Besides browser as a delivery medium has serious limitations in terms of screen real estate, there is only this much functionality one can provide using the browser. It would completely clutter up the user interface, making it very complicated to use.Even with the coolness of Ajax, there are serious limitation to well designed RIAs matching desktop experience.

For RIA to be able to really succeed, the concept of browser has to be redefined. One has to think beyond browser with status bars and forward backward button etc. One has to imagine browser being the platform for delivering rich internet application and website browsing being just one of the subset of functions that it performs. More about this later.