The Next Big Thing In Office Suites: Extensions

It would seem as though there is little left to do in the world of word processing and office suites but fix bugs, ensure compatibility, and add tiny little new features to advanced features no one uses. That is not necessarily true, though.

Imaging you had only ever used a browser that browsed the internet and did nothing else. What else is there to add to that browser, you would think? But, now, if you had a browser that did nothing but browse the web, it would seem like a feature-free browser and you would switch right back to Firefox will all your extensions. The same thing could happen in office suites.

If you have not already figured it out, what I am saying is that extensions are likely to be the next big innovation (or copied innovation from browsers) in office suites. (After all, OpenOffice is already starting to put more focus on extensions.)

It is easy to think “oh yeah, extensions will be great,” but what kind of extensions would you really use in an office suite? Well, for one thing, there are always the time-wasting extensions. You could have RSS feeds, or a media player, or whatever just to waste time have fun. On the more useful side of things, you could have an extension that looks up words on some website and displays the result right inside the office suite. Another example would be an extension that could pull in data, such as stock prices, from a web site.

If extensions do take off, it will give OpenOffice another advantage over Office. Since OpenOffice is already moving in the direction of extensions and Microsoft is often slow to implement new features, it seems almost certain that OpenOffice will get a boost over Office from really supporting extensions. This is turn would give Linux a boost, because the more people who like OpenOffice, the more people who don’t have to worry about Office not existing for Linux.