Economics of IT

Writely right on target

By Brij ⋅ August 22, 2006 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Now disruptive is a much used (abused) word but I am tempted to use that to describe Writely. Its very well designed and comes with extensive features.

Though comparisons will be made against Microsoft Word but I think it’s biggest impact will be on the Wiki market. It has powerful collaboration and revision control which will put Writely in direct competition with leading Wiki solutions. I don’t see many reasons why would anybody use Wiki in the intranet type of environment where Writely will just do fine to manage revisions and sharing.  (Wiki is useful but formatting and large document navigation is a major pain) .

Also in Writely  you get blog posting, pdf export and best of all OpenOffice format which takes format closer to xml for automated import/export.

Very smart acquisition by Google. I doubt they will put ads on this tool, there is much bigger opportunity in linking this with blogger and generating public document repositories.  This is a much better tool for joint book authoring as compared to any wiki or blogging tool.