AjaxWrite, the Newest Ajax Office Entrant

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1. Eric Willis
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 11:22 am

   Nice. For the consumer market, this and other offerings have immediately utility. However, for the business productivity market, I think we are not at the stage where corporates will use services like this unless it is with a well funded provider. Also, there is a huge portion of the market that will not go to an online…on- demand style of offering. Similar to the ondemand business applications market..with CRM..Salesforce.com and others have seen tremendous growth…however, a large majority of the market will never feel comfortable with this type of delivery system for document creation and management. It is much more secure and dependable to have this in-house. However, when this market grows…I think it will put more pricing pressure on Microsoft and that is always a good thing for the market…gotta love innovation!

2. Andrew
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 11:55 am

   Timed out for me 3 times in a row… is calling a web app., Ajaxwrite/launch such a good idea? The tiny percent of the population that even has a clue what AJAX is, wouldn’t make a sustainable business - seems a little too Web 2.0ish for mainstream adoption, I am sure there is a method behind this, as MR doesn’t have too many flops to his credit ..

3. Basil
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 11:58 am

   I worked for 4 pretty big start ups (80+) people in the bay area, all of them used jigsaw.

4. Razvan Antonescu
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 12:07 pm

   Everything is looking nice and fine and is great to see more and more services added to the interactive web. I understand that cutting the costs is an objective, but…god damn how expensive can be a medium graphic designer???

   Look at Measuremap. Power of design in simplicity. Nothing crowded nothing fancy good colours and shapes. Is so hard for everybody to do it?

   Another reason might be on that popular article on ugly sites being attractive to users….:)

5. Rikostan
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 12:27 pm

   Timed out for me every time too. I’ll check it out later, but I am very interested in this.

6. Raju Vegesna
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 12:35 pm

   Mike:

   I beleive Bill G is going to launch an online version of Office. But it’ll probably launched in a way that it’ll require offline version of Office installed on your desktop. The documents created can be sync’ed up between the online version and the offline version.

   Bill did mention many times that he doesnt beleive in just one model (online/offline). I should agree with him on that. Office apps should be available both online and offline for several reasons. Does this mean that existing online office apps will not provide an offline version? Probably not:)

   Raju

7. Mike Jones
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 12:45 pm

   They can’t even support a slight spike in traffic that a mention in techcrunch brings them and microsoft is supposed to be scared that MS Word is out the window because of firefox only ajaxwrite?

   They need to start by taking out “ajax” from their name. Who in their right mind would bundle in a pseudo tech phrase in company name? Maybe Microsoft should call the next version of Work as c++word or better yet, visualbasicword?

8. Liam @ Web 2.5 Blog
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 1:04 pm

   The web 2.0 fumes are getting thick… Folks, this concept has failed at least three times to date:
   1) mini-computers
   2) ASP 1.0 (remember the WebOS? Desktop.com?)
   3) Java streaming (AppStream?)

   If you have enough oomf to run a browser, you have plenty for word processing, etc. There’s no reason to push these apps online. There’s far better ways to make them available even without a laptop, e.g. a flash drive. (Yes, you can run apps right from a flash drive. See my blog for more.)

9. Martin Kloos
   

   March 23rd, 2006 at 1:06 pm

   and as long as they don’t fix their bugs (can’t even save a document because of a java error; and where can I insert mutiple column (not just one) tables?), I think MS has nothing to fear

10. Jon Thar
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:10 pm

    I think you’re missing the point. Obviously he paid very little mind to design, including branding. You can’t knock him on these shortcomings alone.

    He achieved his goal of getting a (somewhat) working product online. I’m not overly impressed with it at this stage, but by releasing it he has a better opportunity to find the right help.

    If this did grow into something, the company name and branding would be handled by professionals.

11. William
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:16 pm

    How many decent web apps do you skip over Micheal, only to give us reviews on products that are barely usable (in my case, barely means NOT.)

    You also mention the word “fast” in your review.

    Is this new slang? Like how bad is good, and fat is cool? Does fast = slow?

12. Saul Weiner
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:17 pm

    This is too little too late. Their are better packages out there by thinkfree and others. And only in firefox? That’s just weak.

13. William
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    Update: 8 minutes have rolled by and I can see the resemblence of a word processcor opening. Though I still can’t point my cursor and begin editing anything.

    Someone working on a document is generally working on what they consider to be an important doc. I would not trust putting anything important in the hands of this website.

    I understand the lack of funding that this project has, but if you are going to submit your product for review to techcrunch - you had better give it a damned good run through QA first. This hack-job mindset is a bit ridiculous.

14. Stefan Mokros
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    Honestly I don’t think such an application can be an substitute for a solid wordprocessor. I mean why should one use a webword when programms with the same amount of features (or even more) are installed on nearly every system. Other than that it is of cause a nice techdemo.

15. Michael Arrington
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:29 pm

    Yes…it’s slow as hell for me too. They should have planned the release a little better, I guess.

16. paul
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:47 pm

    give’em a break. its slashdotted.
    http://slashdot.org/articles/0.....3248.shtml

17. paul
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:54 pm

    and its dugg too. frontpage both
    http://digg.com/technology/aja....._Processor

    there are millions of bored sysadmins hitting it now, not just techcrunch readers. your app would be down too.

18. Mike Jones
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 2:05 pm

    Who are they using for hosting? I hope its not a @home cable model in their garage?

19. Prediction
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 2:20 pm

    History will judge you as a charlatan Mike Arrington.

20. David
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 2:27 pm

    …maybe like writley, they are just trying to put themselves into the acqusition market?

21. adam
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 3:11 pm

    looks like it’s using XUL for the toolbars. if that’s the case, there won’t be an IE port anytime soon. IE 6.x has zero support for it, and I haven’t heard that IE 7.x will either.

    As far as i know, Mozilla based browsers are the only one’s in the XUL camp. I’d imagine it’s hard to grow market share when you’re trapped in 5-10% market share from the get go…

22. Brad
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 3:13 pm

    WPF/XAML apps will be full-featured enough to replace today’s MS Office where it matters, in the office, and that is what we’ll see in a couple years when we are all running Vista. But AJAX/HTML cannot do it. There is no document that I use at work that could be created or maintained with any of these AJAX editors.

23. Sid Steward
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 3:34 pm

    While you’re waiting for it to come back online:

    Start > Programs > Accessories > WordPad

24. Name
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 5:17 pm

    Haha.. This guy really should have thought twice before submitting a terrible app to techcrunch, slashdot, and digg on the same day.

    #1 - feedback is better recieved in small amounts at a time. (i.e: you could have noticed that terrible reviews from techcrunch readers and improved it before submitting it to the rest of the world.)

    #2 - slashdot effect + digg effect = You Lose.

25. Otis Gospodnetic
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 7:56 pm

    Bill G will have Word online, of course. They are just slow. Like OS, like browser, like the office suite.

26. Shishank
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 8:32 pm

    Do we have any online processor that synchronize online documents with a local folder?

    @S
    http://www.pcmspace.com

27. TempTest
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 9:03 pm

    I can’t get it to open any of the word files on my computer. I like the idea but it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

28. Sid Steward
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 9:44 pm

    With all the talk around online authoring and storage, why don’t we hear more about WebDAV? MS Office (and others) have supported it for some time. It lets you edit online documents just as if they were on a local disk.

    From:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV

    “The WebDAV protocol’s aim is to make the World Wide Web a readable and writable medium”

    Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

29. web20guy
    

    March 23rd, 2006 at 10:28 pm

    Dont think there is much money in consumer office - the enterprise customers will not even consider these as options

30. Peter
    

    March 24th, 2006 at 12:09 am

    Comparing this product to Word is rediculous. It has less features than WordPad! Without a page break feature, I don’t see anybody ever using this seriously.

    As for competing with Word, we have seen before (OpenOffice.org) that even a good word processor can’t compete with Word as long as it doesn’t support every bell and whistle Word supports. When users open a Word document they received, and they see lines ending up on other pages, or the macros don’t work, they will leave the product again.

    That is the real power of Word. Make it as difficult as possible to exactly render the same as Word, and as long as Word-users keep sending their Word documents to other people, everybody will need Word… (Apart from a few techies who don’t mind some small weird changes in the layout.)

31. Steffest
    

    March 24th, 2006 at 1:07 am

    Man, this Michael Robertson guy is really pissing me off: He’s huffing and puffing up all this noise for what ? A mediocre buggy online texteditor ?
    Come on, there are far better alternatives around for several years now. I’m a big advocate of online apps, but this is just way premature for release: it’s making the online office concept look bad.

    People abandoning MS Word? I’ve been promoting that for years but it’s not going to happen.

32. Andy
    

    March 24th, 2006 at 4:01 am

    I think the main reason for web apps like this is not to reduce the cost of buying Office products, it’s for ease of use. If I’m out and about I want the ability to go anywhere and create documents/content, not have to carry around a laptop with x number of programs installed.

    Services such as this are great as they allow me to do that (although I agree this needs a bit more testing!)

33. kmx
    

    March 24th, 2006 at 7:23 am

    “That may be true, but at some point I expect Microsoft to come out with ad supported versions of their own clients…”

    They’re going to buy on of these AJAX writers, and they’re going to probably brand it Microsoft Word Live Edition.

34. ceejayoz
    

    March 24th, 2006 at 8:27 am

    Anyone else just getting a 403 Forbidden error for ajaxwrite.com and ajaxlaunch.com?

    Thank goodness I didn’t have some vital documents saved on it, eh?

35. Marcus
    

    March 24th, 2006 at 2:00 pm

    Its funny how you make a post describing rivals for Microsoft Office, while in your left panel you have advt. for Microsoft Office.

36. sean
    

    March 25th, 2006 at 12:14 am

    harsh criticisms y’all. it’s a simple online word processor. that simple. it’s working perfectly for me. yeah, we all have Word on our laptops, but wouldn’t it be great not to have to install the bloated MS-ware on EVERY machine in the house?

    New feature: save online

37. Irfan
    

    March 25th, 2006 at 5:38 am

    I agree that the criticism being displayed here is harsh, but at the same time I can see that the lack of a few of crucial features (that everyone takes for granted for any kinda of half decent document production) are missing.
    Things like page breaks, headers/footers, page numbering and some basic form of TOC.
    Also I dont see how hugely different this is from the numerous Rich Text/HTML Editors that area already out there e.g. FCK Editor.

38. Linker
    

    March 26th, 2006 at 3:27 am

    See also another Ajax-based Online Word Processor; it requires that you register a free account in order to use it: http://www.zohowrite.com/Home.do

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40. Nintendo Wii
    

    February 3rd, 2007 at 7:16 am

    Wasn’t google supposed to launch an online office suite of products?

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