Google’s Writely released; will another sector be squashed?

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1. Jonas
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 6:16 pm

   Yes, that’s what I’m talking about! Google continues to kill web 2.0 business apps. Kiko was the first of many to come.

2. Digger
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 6:38 pm

   But no Safari support …

3. cooper
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 6:47 pm

   I don’t know… gcal kind of sucks. And I adore gmail. people just have to build better apps. Or become profitable at 2 and 3.

4. Chris
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 7:01 pm

   FYI, the Gartner report says “During 2006, we also expect Google to target a Web-based presentation application, such as Thumbstacks (see http://www.thumbstacks.com/).”

5. Sundroid
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 7:02 pm

   I’ve been using Writely before it was bought out by Google. This one is the best of the web-based word processors.

   One sector I’m certain will be severely damaged, if not “quashed”, is the employment opportunity for coders of desktop word processors like MS Word. I’m one of those who “buy ink by the barrel” and the combination of Writely and OpenOffice’s Writer has pretty much eliminated the need for Microsoft Word, in my case.

6. Kori
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 7:06 pm

   Safari support would probably give it a significant boost.

7. kuju
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 7:11 pm

   But……

8. Chris Griffin
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 7:24 pm

   Waiting for Safari Support…………………if it ever comes…………….then I could put Microsoft Office for Mac to rest……………………….I would also be Microsoft-Free

9. Toro
   

   August 17th, 2006 at 7:26 pm

   Good posting!
   http://web2list.com/Google-s-W.....d/803.html
   http://digg.com/tech_news/Goog.....e_squashed

10. Peter
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    I surrender, Google. You can have the market for…me.

    How much is my identity worth on eBay?

11. Robert Dewey
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 7:45 pm

    Some of you guys put too much faith in Google… I surely hope you’re not the same crowd that put faith behind Netscape.

    All jokes aside, I think Google has a better grasp on the web as a platform when compared to the other giants (Microsoft, Yahoo). However; I think even Google might be missing a key mark here in the next 5-10 years.

12. Ricardo Conte
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 7:51 pm

    “The system autosaves your documents every 10 seconds and offers online storage.” - I wonder: after you have finished with the document will it be discarded by Google or kept in Googles world archives for future search ?

13. hash
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 8:02 pm

    This certainly puts the squeeze on some smaller companies. However, it’s when a company is agile enough to be responsive to customers and give them good service, on top of having a great product, that ensures longetivity.

    I don’t think Writeboard or Rallypoint will be going anywhere soon. They’re both great products with an outstanding team behind them.

14. Peter Rip
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 8:16 pm

    I think it is time someone turned the tables on Google. Someone HAS to build an AJAX version of a web crawler, ranking algorithm, index, and ad network. Then they are screwed!

15. met
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 8:29 pm

    Why doesn’t it support google’s login? Or does it? Let me check….

16. Peter Pezaris
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 8:31 pm

    Another sector squashed? Which are the other ones Google has squashed?

17. Marshall Kirkpatrick
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 8:39 pm

    Chris, thanks - added details.

18. Skeptic
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 8:48 pm

    Sorry to say it, but Google isn’t “killing” little companies. Lack of any coherent business model or strategy is killing Web 2.0 ventures. The problem is too many of these folk simply want to get bought BY google.

19. Chris Matthieu
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 9:33 pm

    Check out Docly - Write with Rights. It’s got similar functionality to Writely but with real-time copyright publishing of Numly Numbers and Creative Commons.

    Self-publishers can also sell their works on Docly similar to Lulu and tag their writings like Flickr.

20. Gloria White
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 10:24 pm

    Just created an account and played around with it. Looks nice. Very responsive to pretty much all the actions.
    All this is good, but the key questions are:

    -Will it challange Word in places where MS makes money? I highly doubt that any enterprise, much less any government client would place their faith in anything that’s hosted outside their firewall.
    -Will it have appeal for the not so tech savvy audience that spent over five years in learning Word.
    -There still are a zillion people out there who take training courses for Word and Excel. Will they be interested in this stuff? I’m not too sure. Besides, most of what’s available in Writley is available in Wordpad that ships free with all Windows OSs.
    -Will it have audience in the tech savvy, power users. Perhaps. but privacy concerns will be too numerous.

    Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

21. Michael Arrington
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 10:44 pm

    Marshall - could you please try to fit a few more links in to this post? heh.

22. Anil
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 10:59 pm

    Marshall - I dont buy the story that Google is killing these web 2.0 companies. In the past couple of days a lot of people have been talking about Kiko’s failure. Most of the reasons seem to hint that Google Calendar was the reason.

    One alternative reason which I agree with is the fact that Calendaring without email is not really valuable.

    There is another reason for the failure that no one is talking about: concentrating on the wrong users. If web 2.0 companies see the nerdy/geeky users as their beachead, then they are bound to fail if Google launches a similar product. But if they pick another niche demographic, they might win the battle - the perfect example is YouTube (teens) and My Space(music lovers and now of course teens). These are demographics that dont intersect with Google’s non search services.

    Startups please go after these niche demographics rather than the Silicon Valley nerds or as Josh Kopelman calls them the 53,651 techcrunch readers.

23. Cruncher
    

    August 17th, 2006 at 11:10 pm

    This is my first time looking at any web word processor.I have quickly created a document with image ,some text , played with formats, exported it to WORD, pdf formats.

    Honestly I am impessed.

    May be others 2.0 are better but this one I think, is good enough for any basic documents that I want to write from now on.To me unless others have close to WORD featurelist, I would still stick to Google.

    Couple of things I would like to have (dont know if available already-mine was quick glance) which i think are important if you want write atleast semi-professional documents.
    - header and footer concept
    - paragraph and section concept

    I think initial users will be for personal use and may be small business.

    This no way at this point can compete with WORD. WORD is so feature-rich that enterprise world wont make any switch as they are anyway already paying for WORD and does not cost.For training on word (as somebody posted above) should not matter as corporate will continue to use WORD.

    In my view, other web 2.0 companies in the space, are simply dead. The main reason ,in my view, is the brand and reliabiltiy that Google provides rather than the feature set. Elsewhere I read somebody was using writeboard or something(not sure which one) for one of the projects and after few days, could not access the account for couple days. That is dreadful, somebody could loose business if they are using it for official work. A company like Google ,it is guranteed stuff like this will be very rare.Unless other companies have lots and lots more features and more close to WORD, they wont be able to survive, they are simply dead.

    It is interesting to see what happens in their subsequent releases later, if google adds lots of features and is close to WORD in features.

24. Sundroid
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 12:16 am

    # 18 Gloria,

    1) I agree with you that MS is blessed to have people thinking in the traditional corporate mindset, such as “Gosh, I can’t have my people travel on coach; they’ve got to go on business class!”, and “What’s $150 extra to put MS Office on every computer in the company? Come on, let’s do it!” As for the government sector, more and more are embracing the free OpenOffice suite, which is basically a Toyota to Ms Office’s Mercedes — if you only need to get from point A to point B, you hardly need a Mercedes.

    2) When you mention “training courses for Word and Excel”, I can just see Writely crew smile — Writely is designed so you can log on and start typing.

    3) The notion that corporate servers are safer than Google’s servers is debatable. Remember, all of us are already living the everyday reality that lots of our private information are being stored in the servers of banks, insurance companies, government agencies that are managed by faceless IT people.

    4) Another big point — Writely and all these web-based word processing and spreadsheet programs are first-generation products, and as computer crunching power increases, they will get more and more sophisticated.

    5) This post was written on Writely.

    6) I don’t work for Writely.

25. Wouter
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 2:15 am

    I’ve been using Writely for some time now and I must say it really is magnificient. The design is great and not too disturbing, the interface is responsive and the features are excellent. I really like the tools for collaboration and revision history, no more mailing documents around for me.

    The question of course is will usage spread also to non-tech people? Possibly. I’m very anxious to see what Microsoft will do in response. Maybe adding some web-elements to the traditional Office applications to offer the features Writely offers? If they do that it will definately strengthen their position againt pure web-based solutions like Writely, taking advantage of the huge userbase of the Office products.

26. Rob
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 4:04 am

    Any plans for google to release a task list, maybe with projects and contexts like GTD? Just seems very natural and easy, and while I don’t want to be all in one spot, I’m having a really hard time relating all my online productivity info…

27. Robert Dewey
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 4:55 am

    Gloria,

    You are absolutely right in the fact that enterprise and government don’t want to rely on third-party hosting. Can you think of a solution to that problem? I certainly can…

28. TanNg
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 5:13 am

    It’s funny that ppl compare Writely to MS Office. Writely should be compared with Notes or Wordpad.

29. James Young
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 5:43 am

    I second questioning the lack of unified gmail account login. I uploaded a Word doc with some very simple graphics and formatting such as auto page numbers and it completely fell apart - losing the integrity of the layout/positioning. Wherease the same doc in ThinkFree was fine, hmmmm…

30. garyL
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 7:09 am

    Marshall

    The mistake is thinking that there is a sector for web word-processing services.

    Web-based alternatives to desktop apps suffer in comparison to traditional apps because of poor performance, the fact you have to set up an account and because you’re trusting your documents to third party. And an ad-supported model isn’t very appealing for most people that already have a word processing app.

31. Elmer Fudd
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 7:21 am

    These things will only ever be what a Leatherman tool is to a real tool. Something you use in an emergency that is better than nothing, but it pinches your fingers and scars up your fasteners.

32. Robert Dewey
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 7:50 am

    Elmer et. al.

    It is completely possible that someone could develop a webtop client/server as a package. In that case, the company (or school, or whatever) would simply install the server-side software within their own intranet, and mirror some sort of client side stuff (a slim version of linux?) to all other boxes.

    With a few simple steps, you have now eliminated most licensing costs, and can securely (and quickly - 100mbps) run apps similar to Writely.

    Again, I think Google and Microsoft are on the right track - just not completely their yet.

33. Brad
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 9:04 am

    ThinkFree has the best support for Word’s composition features, though the CNet article doesn’t mention this. I, like James, can’t upload my Word docs to Writely without severe degradation.

34. NJG from NYC
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 9:12 am

    If you look at the history of computing, there’s been cycles both for and against thin clients (this iteration being the Web 2.0 vogue for hosted apps).

    Anyone who bets the farm that this latest swing of the pendulum is never going to swing back is going to be a very unhappy camper down the line.

35. Robert Dewey
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 9:23 am

    NJG,

    That’s true with any disruptive innovation… But eventually, there will be a point where the pendulum doesn’t swing back. My bet is that we’ll be in a solid thin-client mode by 2015 (i.e. next 8-12 years).

36. NJG from NYC
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 9:37 am

    Thin clients aren’t exactly disruptive innovations, they’re simply one of the possible configuration of the processing / data storage requirements to run an application, and have been around longer than the Internet.

37. Robert Dewey
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 10:34 am

    Ah yes, but combine the internet with thin-client computing and voila!

    Same concept as with IP phones… Phones have existed well before the internet - but combining the two makes a more innovative product.

    I think we can both agree on the fact that thin-client computing won’t be taking over the consumer market anytime soon…

38. Cruncher
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 10:35 am

    donot compare it with WORD but compare it with wordpad (as somebody pointed out above).

    That summerizes it, it is a web wordpad.

39. Aron Roberts
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 10:43 am

    While it’s true that, as “Elmer Fudd” suggested, one of the functions of online word processors will be to serve as “something in an emergency” - say, for writing up a quick document when caught without a working laptop at a conference - I believe that “Wouter” was onto their real value when spotlighting “the tools for collaboration and revision history.” At least for now, where these tools really shine is in collaborative writing and editing.

40. dysonlu
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 10:51 am

    What happens if my corporate Net connection suffers an outage?

    Why didn’t entreprises choose GMail has their email service but instead host their own email servers?

41. Robert Dewey
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 11:55 am

    dysonlu,

    In a third-party to enterprise solution (Writely) - you’re screwed. In an intranet setting - no problem.

42. Cruncher
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 12:20 pm

    okay ,in one line -
    Writely is a web wordpad with collboration support.

43. dysonlu
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 12:57 pm

    Robert Dewey,

    In the scenario where the service is hosted on the intranet, the no-cost aspect goes out the window and suddenly that option looks a bit less attractive.

    I really doubt these web-centric software will gain any significant traction in the corporate arena. Besides, I’m sure it’s easier to add online-awareness to Word than to make Writely as sophisticated as Word. So, when all is said and done, the Word stronghold will probably suffer very little disruption.

44. Yoda
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 1:34 pm

    Will another sector be squashed? I don’t know that you can claim the online word processing market to be a “sector.” Little to no revenues. No traction with corporate clients. So let Google “squash” the sector. Corporations and the average PC user are not going to move away from Word anytime soon. Let Google corner the “market.” There’s nothing there. It’ll be another one of Google’s “killer” products that kills nothing. It’s a cool product to be sure but technology for technology’s sake usually doesn’t make a viable business.

45. Klian
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 3:23 pm

    Wow!

    Powerful online word processor.

    I know now why Google adquired it

46. Roger Jennings
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 3:26 pm

    I’m underwhelmed by Writely’s performance and feature set. I gave Writely a test as a blog editor (http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/writely-beta-finally-opens-with-thud.html) to compare with Windows Live Writer/WLW (http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/windows-live-writer-beta-blogger-test.html). Both have their problems, but Writely has many more problems than I’d expect with Blogger as the test blogging app.

    I agree with Yoda that there’s no online word processing market sector. Writely’s squashing ants while the elephants are running overhead.

    –rj

47. Sundroid
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 5:16 pm

    Google’s lawyers must be breathing a sigh of relief hearing all these “Google’s Writely squashes nothing” declarations.

    The legal bugle boys at Google (see how I rhyme) would be seriously sweating if it could be proven in court that Google Calendar crushed the entire web-based calendar sector and its Writely killed off all other online word processors. It’s safe to assume that Google wants to avoid the nightmare Microsoft lived through when they were hit with multiple anti-competitive suits by the likes of Netscape, Sun, Apple, WordPerfect, EU, and our own government.

    On the other hand, if that were the case, these lawyers would have job security for years to come, but that’s a different movie.

48. Dennis Howlett
    

    August 19th, 2006 at 5:45 am

    I’ve been using Writely for months. Any client side writing I do always gets edited via this service. Clients - who are mostly enterprisey - find it strange but are willing to give it a try.

    The one thing that irks me - the Beta meter hasn’t moved in months. I’m not sure but I can’t say I’ve seen any new features. Anyone know?

49. Roger Jennings
    

    August 19th, 2006 at 8:21 am

    Writely might be “collaboration friendly” for trivial word-processing but it doesn’t come close to making the grade for WYSIWYG blog editing. See http://oakleafblog.blogspot.co.....thud.html.

50. Todd Zeigler
    

    August 19th, 2006 at 8:38 am

    I’m a fan of Writley, but as Roger mentions it has a way to go as a blog publishing tool. I use Wordpress and have consistently had problems with formatting and images when publishing from Writely. The new Windows Live Writer is much, much better for blogging than Writely, in my opinion. Writely needs to improve its blog tools greatly for me to use it consistently - about half my word processing needs are blog related at this point.

51. TCruncher2
    

    August 20th, 2006 at 7:23 pm

    I look at it this way - Google is trying to Challenge Microsoft. Problem is - Microsoft own 90% of the worlds operating systems not to mention it dwarfs Google in terms of Market Capitalisation.

    What I dont get, is why Microsoft doesn’t just focus on what its good at instead of trying to always build apps that compete with Google.

    Let them have there Writely, sure 2% of the internet will use it. But if I’m typing up my financial info - there is no way writely is going to get my vote.
    Plus it is going to take the Writiely team a century to get the level of Microsoft Word. There is so much “but I can use it away from my PC” - I travel ALOT and I dont think i have ever needed to use something like writely. People have managed for the last 25 years no problem without online apps like this, and I really dont think that there is going to be a huge business change until more features are added.

    If writely built in a “paid” version that offered superior security etc etc then maybe. Until then - useless…….