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It's why Microsoft Office ended up kicking ass over the other competitors.
People won't use what they don't know exists.
Hope you are a strong swimmer. ;-)
An online word processor is a utility. An online word processor, for example, w/a customized, paid-subscription plan for specific industries, pre-populated with marketing communications pieces and other industry-specific text ... goes beyond a utility and to a "done for us" system ... and can command an enormous premium for use.
Beyond the initial "get bought out" model, niche models are always available with high-profits with small numbers to those who are willing to shift paradigms.
I worked with the developers from Zoho to try to test this for them but they couldn't get it to work.
Writely works perfectly on my Mac.
Case closed.
Tom, we apologize for the trouble with Safari on Mac. Zoho works on Firefox on Mac. We are still having trouble with Safari, but we will support it in future. The rapid pace of evolution is making it hard to test on Safari, in addition to IE and Firefox.
Sridhar Vembu
http://zoho.com
you're right if all online wordprocessors remain effectively the same plus or minus a few features. A small entrant has to recast this market. For example, journalists need less formatting features and just want to write. But mashup those features with apporpriate research features and other market specific features might make a product very attractive to jourmalists. Now expand this to other markers which have need of wordprocessing, but really need/desire a features or a user experience that's outside of what a mainstream product will do.
And? Prior to gmail, did you not use something else? You didn't become a gmail user because you had already been using it, you weren't "locked" in. They created a service with differentiating features.
I agree with Tom above though - you need to it to work on all platforms (Writely), but you also need it to re-think the paradigm of a word processor. MS Word just has too much feature bloat. I'll be happy when the new version has less features, not more but marketeers can't get their head around that (unlike 37 Signals, who can).
I don't buy the big fish theory. If a new product's functionality and cost ratio makes it a better value, I'm not only using it, but I'm telling all my non-geek and half-geek friends and colleagues about it.
That's why I traded-in IE for Firefox, Win2K for Linux, FrontPage for Cute HTML, etc. The viral impact of early adopters, espeically with the help of blogs and social networks, drive a product's acceptance faster than the size of its parent. In fact I tend to steer clear of new software from large companies because I know it's half-baked when its released.
Normal users don't read scoble.
Anyway, 80 percent of what I need in a word processor can, in fact, be done in this little text box above the "Submit Comment". Add the local persistence features of Notepad, and you're up to 95 percent of what I need. Add Text centering, margins, and page numbers, and that's about it.
My company pays, what?, 300 dollars per Office installation. Wait, I'll check...
Okay, I blew 5 minutes and couldn't figure out what "suite" I've got. It's the big one. It's got Access (snort) and Visio. The only one I ever use is Outlook and I hate it.
There are certain advantages to everybody using Windows--it helps ensure wide availability of software. In the old days, you'd go to a software store and they'd have 10 different sections. Amiga, C64, Apple II, PC, Atari, etc. There really wasn't any advantage to that.
But Office? Bleh. It's a goner.
But forget web versions of office. What you'll really have happen is--little companies saving money by using Open office (or whatever) and then growing into big companies.
In the content business I believe I can come up with something unique that the big players aren't doing.
But, in the word processor business? That's a lot harder.
I mean, you've worked at Microsoft talking to people about Microsoft products. That does NOT make you a geek.
I still do. It's called Hotmail. From Microsoft. Lots of smaller companies tried to do free email too. Which is sort of why I came to this place.
OTOH, DabbleDB is the bomb - like MS Access only better. This is the killer desktop to web app for me.
An interesting one though is Wordpress. Somehow over the last few months they have gone to dead reliable in my mind, and I am less concerned about doing my own personal backup. My confidence may be misplaced, but thats how I feel. So can Zoho develop that confidence level - if so, they have a winner.
I keep thinking about Roberts key point - how the small things get missed, such as the importance of search, back 7 years ago. This could be one of those situations.
If the little guys (or the big guys, for that matter) think they are in the word processor business, they'll be crushed. Google is in the attention business at the moment ... and there is a logical place for a word processor to play a role there. There are many *other* business models that can also use an online, collaborative word processor to drive the outcomes of their markets.
Sridhar Vembu
It’s why Microsoft Office ended up kicking ass over the other competitors. "
Oh my. Scoble, I'm starting to agree with you more and more. One of us is changing :)
Incumbency is a big advantage, and for the use that MOST people make of computers, it is the ONLY advantage.
That is why I poo-pooed the idea that 2005 was "the year of Linux on the desktop" (ditto for 2004, 2003, 2002, ...)
But resentments DO build up when a vendor consistently fails to deliver things users want (or consistently delivers things that users DON'T want). I was probably one of the first few thousand people to sign up for a Yahoo account, and only a few years later did I learn that with a Yahoo ID I got free e-mail (either that or I had just forgotten about it). The web interface seemed pretty slick at first. You could also download messages with a standard POP program, and I think at one point they were giving away 15-20 meg of storage which at the time seemed enormous.
I was so sold on the Yahoo brand that I got a Yahoo pager, hosted domains with them, and switched to using them as my ISP when I was still on dial-up. But it wasn't Google that got me to switch, it was Yahoo...
They changed the rules on e-mail storage so that you suddenly got much less space unless you wanted to pay for an account. The Yahoo pager, a deal with RIM, was discontinued after only a year, leaving me with a useless device that I had paid several hundred dollars for. Their hosting service as well as their ISP service were also third party deals (as in: the third party does all the work, takes all the risk, Yahoo puts their name on it). The ISP had serious billing problems. They cancelled my account having never sent me a bill. The domains hosting was pretty good, but it seemed that every 6 months or so the third-party company was either changed or the services changed in some dramatic way. The consistency I would have expected with the Yahoo name simply was a myth.
Their initial response to Gmail, which was to start giving away space again, was pathetic. When they went to a Gig, Gmail went to two, and Google made it fairly clear that they would not take second place to any of the majors when it came to giving away Inbox space. Next Yahoo (and Microsoft) promised AJAX based webmail. That was what, almost two years ago? I just got mine working on Hotmail last week. On Yahoo I'm still waiting.
Users (at least this user) have a long memory about being played for suckers by vendors they trust.
I think competition is good, and I wish more users were willing to try alternatives when they do arrise, but the fact is, many users stick with what they have even if it causes them daily grief. They remember how hard it was to learn DOS, then OS/2 then Windows, then Wordperfect and on and on and they have no desire to repeat that learning process unless there is some fundamentally new capability that comes with it. Having your stuff online, all the time is that capability, and I suspect that most users are quite willing to give up Wing-Ding fonts and a lot of other silly stuff to be able to seamlessly share things among he computers they use, with family members, etc. Sooner or later that concept will find its way into the workplace.
We are finally reaching the point where users don't have to upgrade their PCs every two years just to do ordinary things Let the battleground go back to server space where it belongs (and has belonged for a long time) and let users view their computers as appliances that "just work" no matter what OS they are running. Windows, OS X and Linux all have the equivalent of Notepad (except OS X's will format Word documents just fine, and I think the all incorporate spellchecking now) and most peoples only use for a database are the back-ends to their Content Management Systems and so forth, maintained and backed-up by people paid to do just that.
I pronounce 2007 as the year of the "who cares desktop". It's about time!
So I don't think longevity is an issue with them, which will really be important when we decide to trust them with all our online data, not just newly created documents - they will soon have ZohoDrive. While on the subject, they are the only ones with a complete office suite, including the Excel and PowerPoint replacements. Yes, I know, functionally just a subset, yadayada, but you know what I mean .. for the 90% of us who use 10% of the functionality, it's good enough:-) Btw, they also have calendar as part of Virtual Office (yes, the Outlook replacement), Creator, a CRM-package, Polls, and I don't even know what else.
I have not heard of them until half a year or so ago, but they appear to be a formidable force quite bent on being the Web App provider for small businesses and individuals.
Anyway, that's exactly the point the Zoho guys have not missed, first delivering all components of a Suite, then integrating them - these will not be point solutions for long.
Yes - it is an uphill srtuggle at times getting Office people who haven't seen anything different to understand the value these services bring but they're getting there. And at a decent clip.
With various of their computer systems, and in various ways, the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft guys all go out of their way to try to lock users in. One reason Microsoft got big was because it made it super-easy to *import* data from third party apps, but hard to export it really well. In 2007, this is no longer good enough. My prediction is that the big players of the future will get big by making it easy for people to export their data.
Anyway, let's let Google settle this one. Search for "Geek Blogger" and I don't find your name. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=geek+b...
In fact, search for "geek" and you'll see I'm #24 & #25. http://www.google.com/search?q=geek&hl=en&a...
Since Google is now the arbiter of all things cultural my answer is: too bad.
By the way, what an elitist attitude you have! So someone needs to grok Linux just to be a geek? Wonderful. And people say +I'm+ arrogant? Whew!
Would I go up against an already established Google/MS/Yahoo service as a small company? Hell no, but if you can be different then I think you still have a good chance.
Even if it had an autosave, there's just no reason to be doing it over the web. I can terminal to my work PC so it isn't like I need my files on a server somewhere.
I have found myself in the medical software business since Shell Oil opted to move their IT operations to Malaysia. I am disabled with Cerebral Palsy, and can only talk with computer assistance. I had to develop my own software to speak because my Shell employers found none of the commerically available products acceptable. Even now, ten years later, my software makes the stuff Dr. Stephen Hawkins uses sound sick by comparsion. Yet, I have come to the sad conclusion that I'll probably never sell a single copy.
I say that because the people who really need my software will never know it exists. The people who vet such things don't see enough disabled people in working environments to ever think they need real quality speech software. Meanwhile, I get poorer and poorer. It takes money to make money.
So when I saw that Zoho lets you blog, I am in baby! Mind you my wife and I use the same computer posting to multiple blogs with multiple logins. Thank you Zoho!
Now you may be right about these small companies survining as independent companies in the long run - acquisition by larger companies seems to be the current trend. But that doesn't mean the products launched by these small companies will not become popular with very large user bases
thanks,
Brad