Google Docs has some real competition

Stan Beer
Thursday, 12 October 2006 13:15

Opinion and Analysis

While the world is going ooh and ah about the merging of Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a package called Google Docs and Spreadsheets, it may surprise them to know that Google has some serious competitors in the online office productivity space. What’s more, in some cases they're way more advanced than the search leader.

Online software as a service (SaaS) applications have been with us for some time and have been predicted by organizations such as Gartner to gain a sizable chunk of the business applications market by the end of the decade. Salesforce.com is the company many point to as leading the way in this area.

In the online office productivity space, however, there are also some emerging products that have been developed.  Two examples that readily spring to mind are Zoho and Thinkfree.

Both of the above-mentioned Web 2.0 products, unlike Google, offer the full suite of basic office productivity tools, including a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application. Zoho also offers a free database, a planner, a project management package and, for a monthly rental of US$12, a CRM package.

Thinkfree probably presents the most well integrated package, with a web-based implementation of a virtual filing system for documents that simulates the desktop. Thinkfree also offers off-line users a Java-based desktop Microsoft Office compatible clone for US$50 that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Fedora Core 3 Linux.

As far as solving the needs of offline users, at $50, the Thinkfree Microsoft Office clone sounds interesting. However, Open Office.org 2.0 is free and has already proven itself to be good enough for business use – even if Microsoft says it’s 10 years behind Office 2007.