Battling the Bloat

Browse through a round-up of office suite software today, and you'll find business as usual. The new versions of the name products (Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite, and Corel WordPerfect Suite) all offer more applications, increased Web features, flashier interfaces than past versions--and all claim an ever--increasing chunk of your hard drive and processor power.

Over the last few years, a new term has been introduced into the computing vocabulary: "bloatware," defined by the ZDNet Webopedia as "software that is so overloaded with functionality that its performance suffers." Given that the leading suites gobble up a hefty 130MB of disk space, many users wonder whether the benefits of the latest productivity tools outweigh the cost of a hardware upgrade, even if it keeps getting cheaper. Some companies are gambling that the way to trim the fat lies not in application suites, but designer Java applets.

The first Java office suite to ship is Lotus's eSuite. Its WorkPlace application--which includes a Web browser, mail program, word processor and spread-sheet, among others--is being bundled with the Network Station 1000, IBM's venture into the fledgling network computer (NC) market. The WorkPlace suite is designed to run on an NC with 32 MB of RAM. A separate app which allows developers to build customized applets within WorkPlace will ship later this year.

The catch? No PC version--yet. But Jeff Symoens, a senior analyst at InfoWorld's Test Center in San Mateo, CA, says that while "NC is the market for that type of product offering, [Lotus] will be extending it to other platforms. There's room for those products on the PC in the future."

According to Symoens, eSuite is "not a full office suite loaded with thousands and thousands of features, but it is well-suited for certain purposes." He notes that custom solutions can be built into the eSuite desktop that are targeted toward a user's specific needs.

Given the powerful hardware PCs currently ship with, isn't the concept of bloatware just a smokescreen? Not so, says Symoens: "For an individual running software at home on new PC, it's not as much of an issue. But if you've already got a PC, and it's not the latest and greatest, it's a consideration.

"On the corporate side, if you're rolling out a new product to 10,000 desktops, a huge percentage of those desktops won't be the latest and greatest. So there it's very much a consideration."

But Java suites aren't a universal solution. Some tasks, like desktop publishing, require more processing power than an NC setup can deliver--and for companies with newer equipment, Symoens says that Java isn't in any danger of taking over.

"For specific environments and purposes, Java is a great alternative. But if you've got 200 MHz Pentiums with lots of disk space, why bother?" He adds that "the pricing perspective could be an advantage for corporations [eSuite is priced at $49 per user in its current distribution], but then corporations aren't paying list price for office suite software anyway."

As for home use, don't junk that PC just yet. NCs require servers to host their software--in fact, most NCs don't even have hard drives. The days of commercial NC servers are still a glint in Larry Ellison's eye, and if you could afford a phone line fast enough to support the connection today, you're probably a corporation anyway. For now, a bigger hard drive is a far cheaper alternative. But the day may come when you can save that extra disk space for a truly useful application.

Anyone for a game of Quake III?

Sean G. Thomas, Sean Thomas, Sean Garrett Thomas