Last week, I said that two competitors make a market, which brings the following question: what about three? Well, three is even better, and this week was a good case in point, with the release of ajaxWrite and FormSpring.

ajaxWrite is an alternative to Writely and Zoho Writer, and got a good review from Brian Benzinger on Solution Watch. It sports a user interface very similar to the one popularized by Microsoft Word, and I tend to believe that such a design choice will be required to convert existing Word users, even though the Google-like approach favored by Zoho Writer might actually lead to improved end-user productivity. Multiple stylesheets that go beyond color schemes and provide radically different user interfaces on top of the same infrastructure might be the answer on the long run: get existing Microsoft Office users converted through the use of an Office-like user interface, then let them upgrade to a Web 2.0 model with a single mouse click.

As far as FormSpring is concerned, it competes directly with jotForm, Wufoo, and Zoho Creator, and seems to be the most advanced of the pack in terms of features. It does not have the clean user interface sported by Wufoo, or the upcoming live integration with an Office 2.0 spreadsheet editor that has been mentioned in the past by the Zoho folks, but features like the ability to create multi-page forms with skip/branching logic to hide non-applicable questions is certainly impressive.

At this point, most categories within my Office 2.0 setup have three entries or more, and time might have come to provide a more comprehensive way of tracking all their features and comparing applications against each others. Let’s see how Office 2.0 applications could help us build such a thing…