Stan Beer
Thursday, 12 October 2006 14:15
Opinion and Analysis
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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.
