QuickTime Creator Brings Flash and Office To the iPad, By Subscription 118
New submitter adycarter writes "Steve Perlman, the man responsilbe for QuickTime and WebTV, has recently launched OnLive Desktop which now offers a 'plus' service enabling iPad users to use Flash, Microsoft Office and the ability to use a Gigabit-speed version of Internet Explorer. The service runs on the same basic technology as their game streaming service in that you're using your iPad as client to access a machine located in the cloud."
Good Enough (Score:4, Interesting)
For someone who MUST have Flash (almost no-one) this is a perfect compromise.
I'm not sure I'd pay a monthly fee just to view restaurant menus though.
too much, too late (Score:4, Interesting)
with people now dropping Flash, and free work-arounds available, a paid Flash experience is doomed. As for Office, if you need it, buy a Macbook Air, or similar. BTW, there are rumours of Office for iPad floating around, and an MS-Works for iPad would sell well, IMHO.
Re:The data cost to use this will be high (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, that may be one of the prices that needs to be paid when one chooses a platform where you're not allowed to run anything you want. It also may turn out that some of the services like this will actually speed up the experience, like with Opera mini. Anything heavy on processing and light on moving graphics will be much faster run like this. It may turn out that Office runs faster than it would natively.
Re:he is not responsible for QuickTime (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked with Steve at Apple for a couple of years; we were both in ATG. Steve did not play any meaningful role in Quicktime. Quicktime was done by a completely different organization and they were not particularly fans of what we "researchers" were doing :) Bruce Leak and others were really the creators and principals.
At Apple Steve did research on hardware accelerated embedded multimedia. It was similar to what he went on to do at WebTV (and then sold to Microsoft for a pile of bucks, which was a nice trick) but practically nothing to do with Quicktime.