Rogue Wolves

Writely Blog:

Writely is now part of Google!

Yes, we've been acquired by Google, and we're really excited about this for many, many reasons. But I can hear you saying, "I don't care why YOU'RE excited - I want to know how this change will impact ME!"

Interesting play by Google. Are they really considering trying to take a bite out of Microsoft's cash cow? Maybe in the small business/home user space but I don't think so in big business. There is also the issue of how much traction an online word processor can gain. User's tend to immediately think Microsoft Word when they need to create a document. It will be hard to undo that mind set. Also, online apps are just that...online. What happens when you want to edit documents with no internet connection? Don't tell me I have to pay for Office just to edit my documents on the road? Or install OpenOffice... Two apps for the same task doesn't work. User's want one unified tool.

What would be cool is if they offered a tool similar to TiddlyWiki then you could work on documents while offline but I'm not sure how easy this would be for end users. They would need to know to use the offline version when not online and the actual website when they are. Not pretty. Could the website be cached and some javascript executes that detects if an internet connection exists and put's the website into offline mode using cached pages? Hmm interesting...

I'm not sure where this is going yet we'll have to wait and see. I'm sure Microsoft is watching this closely and hyperventilating and you can bet they have been working on an online version of Office. Maybe Google's plan is just to get Microsoft's knickers in a twist?

Update: Here is an interesting read on the google purchase on CNN Money.com  and an even more interesting read that ties into what I was rambling about.  I like his take on how this could work utilyzing desktop applications for local editing (OpenOffice) and a web application (Writely) for when you are at a public terminal.  As long as files are synchronized between your Internet filesystem and your local file system that could work nicely.

Here's a good example of one of the many benefits of web applications. I'm looking at Google's web application Gmail as a general case...

Gmail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

In January 2005, security experts discovered a critical flaw in the handling of Gmail messages that would allow hackers to easily access private e-mails from any Gmail user's account. This was posted with detailed information to popular technology site Slashdot at 9:23 a.m. PST on January 12, 2005. At roughly 10:15 a.m. PST on January 13, 2005, developers at Gmail announced that they had fixed the problem, and that the security flaw had been patched. Despite Gmail's status as a beta application, this raised concerns among some users who use Gmail as their primary mail account.

Situation: A flaw was discovered that would affect hundred's of thousands of users and in less than an hour the security flaw was fixed and applied to all users nearly instantaneously.

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