So much for the rumor, the aquisition of Writely by Google has now been confirmed on both the Writely blog and by Google. Congratulations to the Writely team.
This signals two things: a confirmation of Google’s desire to hit Microsoft hard and attack their largest revenue product, and that they will do this at least partially through acquisition rather than building the office suite entirely in-house. When, if ever, will Microsoft respond with their own online versions of the Office products?
UPDATE: Russell Beattie has a very funny web page congratulating Writely. Check it out.
Nice, this triggers at least another 2 rounds of guessing games though. If Writely is MS Word, who will Google buy to complete the holy triumvirate that makes up MS Office? irows? jotspot? to compete against MS Excel? thumbstacks.com for MS Powerpoint?
I would’ve thought with all the geniuses in house at Google that this wouldn’t be all that hard to code, but apparently this is cheaper/easier/better. Does that say something about Google’s in-house dev team? Or is it just that their real resources are still in search?
We need a spreadsheet… Hopefully, they’ll add this feature.
Does someone know how much Google paid for Writely or how many users Writely has currently?
Bjorn Lee,
the answer to that question is in Davey Jones’ locker along with the cure for cancer and secret of Area 51.
When, if ever, will the marketplace show that there is significant demand for a browser-based office suite?
Well Done Writely! Congrats! Writely’s a really good product. Bjorn, I think you would remember our first Web 2.0 Collaborative sale when we used Writely to plan our attack on the Thanksgiving Black Friday sales?
http://www.just...aborative-sale/
Hahaha!
Is it just me or does Writely look to be built on Windows Technology?
Who did Newscorp buy from that conference last week?
Matt, writely is built on ASPX and I’m betting it will be converted to PHP soon. I don’t think this is an office killer, or even a word killer. It will need a whole lot of more features to be even in the same category.
Does that say something about Google’s in-house dev team?
Perhaps that they (or the business people) are smart enough to know when to buy a product than spend time reinventing the wheel? Dev teams should add value and not just code up something to look like a competitor out there.
I wonder what this means for GOffice, which is more established and offers far more robust technology. Think their phone is ringing today?
I wonder which spreadsheet site will get bought up next by Google?
And, now that they are part of Google, they never need to worry about coming out of Beta …
Still I would like to see how they address the issue of offline editing, if they would like to be even close to what MS Word is.
Cool!
Well, I guess iRows is next…
How long until it becomes Google ________ ?
I know with Keyhole the rebrand took a fair while. Picasa was never rebranded but it took ages for ver 2 (the first real update). And Urchin took a while to become Google Analytics.
I’d reckon 2 months.
“I would’ve thought with all the geniuses in house at Google that this wouldn’t be all that hard to code”
This is just a very uneducated statement. For a few thousand shares, Google gets 1) a terrific app, 2) a block of users and 3) a competent development team.
Yes, Writely is .Net. Considering Orkut was created on .Net, I don’t think it’s a given that Google would port it necessarily. Although I think it would make a lot of sense from a cost and flexibility standpoint.
This move doesn’t make much sense to me.
I use Writely; I like Writely. But a word processor it is not. In fact, I’d say Google Pages is closer to a word procesor, with more bells and whistles than Writely has.
If Google is working on a web office, I’d think it would come out of their relationship with Sun and OpenOffice rather than here. I just don’t see how it fits.
seems to me, google’s strategy here is more to obtain the good developers at writely.. curious to know the purchase price.. probably much less than $5mil.. google could probably make some x that with the new developers working on new ways to put ads into word-like documents.
btw.. I thought writely was great.. but i really don’t care to use it any longer since it’s going to be on google’s servers.
i’ll use Mac’s subetha instead..
Writely uses ASP.NET. Is Google going to rewrite it?
When I read your headline, I thought you meant that Writely had acquired Google, heh. You might want to be a little more precise in your language. ;>
Yeah a spreadsheet tool should be next on the list. NumSum probably leads the pack…
Congrats to the Writely team. It doesn’t matter what Writely runs on in the back-end, Google would be interested in the client-side. I would say that the price paid was much less than $5M
I think it’s great that Google recognises a good idea regardless of which technology used. So far everyone’s been seeing this as an attack against Microsoft, but, the way I see it this could be a knock against Yahoo since they’ve picked up Flickr. Seems like a bit of a “who gets the good Web 2.0 apps first” race.
I cant comment on any of the “Will Microsoft port their code for online”-questions, but I can ask another question in return…
Office 2003 introduced the use of web services in its side panel, Microsoft spent quite a bit of time, effort and money on their SharePoint tech, so why compete against themselves? I think they have more important things to worry about now that Apple went in favour of Intel.
I guess its a round about way of saying it, but great work Writely Team!
is there anyway to get invites for this?
ive been looking, but this site:
http://www.skat...quires-writely/
says they’ve closed it. is this true?
John, They have closed it only to new registrations. If you’re an old Writely user you can log in. Until the user account system has been changed to use Google login those that are not current Writely members will have to wait.
My guess is after the switch you will need a Google account, which is by invite.
Dude, that sucks. I used Writely a lot, and it was terrible. I finally found a much better solution at http://www.thinkfree.com. Check them out if you want to edit documents and spreadsheets and keep them online.
I wish they had been bought by google. Then we could really expect great things in the near future.
Oh well, congrats writely.
my writely account (I don’t need it anymore) it’s for sale.
http://cgi.ebay...1QQcmdZViewItem
…What’s next Google [especially after acquiring Writely] ?…
Floint.com?
I will buy anyone’s google analytics invite for $5. Email me if you have one available. I will pay with paypal. thanx!!
Selling analytics invite is not Legal ! any way i have 6 of them …