First Office 2.0 Acquisition
Thursday, March 9th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
Today, Google announced the acquisition of Upstartle, the company that developed Writely, an Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft Word. This marks the first significant Office 2.0 acquisition by one of the major Web 2.0 players, and I would expect many more to follow this year, mainly from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. It also means that Google’s support for OpenOffice might have been a simple diversion. I personally never understood why a Web 2.0 company would put any resources behind an Office 1.0 project, and today’s acquisition of one of the best online word processors — alongside Zoho Writer — is a much welcome clarification. Now I cannot wait for the upcoming Google Calendar recently featured by Michael Arington on TechCrunch.
Entry filed under: Consolidation, Office 2.0
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While I can see certain benefits in having a web-based office productivity suite (as in Office 2.0), I don’t “get” the hype actually. Sure, web-based email is very useful and I think there is a certain purpose for Office 2.0, but we already discussed that being “offline” is one of the hardest problems, so why not go for a solution like a portable OpenOffice on an USB stick and store everything on some server?
You can argue that you can access your documents with Office 2.0 through a PDA, but you can hardly say that you can do serious editing on a PDA (even if it has a keyboard). Until now, the only thing that I can being useful is a good calendar that is synced with your Outlook or Apple iCal.
Please enlighten me, because I don’t “get” the Office 2.0 hype :-)
Lee,
You will find a good case for Office 2.0 there. And you’re right, I would not advise the use of a PDA for doing any productive work, and it is true for both Office 1.0 and Office 2.0. Unless your work has to do with inventory control or patient-facing healthcare data access, I find PDAs to be quite useless frankly. The use of a memory stick does not really address the need for backups and document sharing, therefore I will always prefer a solution where all documents are stored online.
“The use of a memory stick does not really address the need for backups and document sharing, therefore I will always prefer a solution where all documents are stored online.”
I was refering to the use of a portable OpenOffice on a USB stick that you can carry around, and some online storage for your documents and configuration files. Perhaps something like an enteprise content management feature could be useful in the sense that your portable OpenOffice get some versioning and other services online. Anyway, I’ll take a look at the Office 2.0 rationale.
Thanks.
Lee,
That makes sense, but it assumes that all users you want to share your documents with use the same software, or at least software that is compatible. Based on my experience, it’s never really the case, and this new little feature that people get with the latest version of Microsoft Office will break everything. The benefit of using Office 2.0 services such as Writely or Zoho Writer is that they work for everybody, as long as you have a web browser. This is the type of “portability” that really makes a difference.
[…] The discussion can be found here and his rationale for using Office 2.0 can be found here. Last but not least an overview of Office 2.0 products on del.icio.us. […]
I just read an article today on The Register about hotmail on the move. Then a question popped up in my mind: does the device have to adapt to Office 2.0, or does Office 2.0 have to adapt to the device? What I mean is, do we need slimmed down versions of each Office 2.0 application, or should one single version wotk both with PCs and mobile devices?
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