Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

It is official. My favorite “web2.0” company Writely got acquired by Google, ending what I’d imagine was an interesting dance between the interested parties and Writely folks Congragulations is in order for both the folks in Writely and Google. Congragulations to Writely (to be more precise, Upstartle) for developing such a great platform/product and congragulations to Google for their ability to recognize the potential of this platform and the talent of the people who developed it.

Not surprisingly, the usual characters took notice and posted about the acquisition in their blogs. Some quite positive , and some negative (or even clueless ), yet most of the bloggers does not seem to understand what Writely is all about, or at least the posts do not highlight the right aspects of it (There are exceptions of course). Majority of the posts approach Writely as the web based version of Microsoft Word. Obviously Writely is a word processor and so it Microsoft Word, but I believe differences outweight the similarities. Nicolas Carr attempts to live up to the expectations as the most snarky blogger by stating that he’s going to be “hanging on” to his copy of Word for a while. The bloggers with positive outlook on Writely also see Writely as a replacement for Word in the larger scheme of MS Office vs Web Office, longing for the anticipated battle ahead between Google and Microsoft.

Yet Google’s strategy wisely has not been taking on Microsoft head on so far, and this philosopy is shared by the Writely folks. Writely does not attempt to completely replace Word. Writely folks do not just attempt to replicate the feature set of Word over the web, but innovate by taking advantage of the web. They clearly state how they see their product on their website : “The beginning of a whole new way of managing documents, projects and websites online”.

Writely does not and cannot do may things Word can do easily, but also provides great functionality that goes well beyond anything that is provided by Word. I think it would be gross neglect not to emphasize the “collaborative” aspects of Writely. For me Writely solves a real problem of collaboratively working on a document. Anyone who has worked on documents that required participation of multiple parties can relate to the headaches: emailing new versions of a multiple megabytes of document to all participants (can the recipient receive a large attachment?), keeping track of the versions (am I modifying the latest version?), ensuring everbody can actually “read” your document (do they all have Word?), and others.

From this perspective Writely is priceless, and it solves a real business problem. We can now work on the same document even at the same time, be automatically alerted when a document is modified, can see who made what modification, older versions, etc. and don’t have to learn how to use weird tags). Productivity gains are tangible, life is easier with Writely. And Writely does not attempt to “lock” your document in. You can save your document as Word or OpenOffice document or publish directly as PDF file. I use both Mozilla Thunderbird and Gmail and this will likely be the case for some time to come. I suspect that the same will be true for Writely and OpenOffice. If fact I believe one area Writely can benefit is tighter integration with an offline word processor like OpenOffice. That may be the theme for another post..

Upstartle/Writely is the poster child of the new breed of companies:

• Small: Only handful of talented people
• Minimal funding requirements: No need for tens of millions of dollars of funding from VCs. Early funding via the founders/angels, and get acquired by a large player or go public.
• Fast: The site was built in under a year (6 months!) and already operational/useful.
• Open/transparent: Both from technical and social perspective, takes advantage of web technologies, has open communications with early users, integrates with other sites/products, etc.

This validates the notion that the small companies/teams are the best setup to innovate and build new technologies and the large players (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) are the best places to bring the technology to the masses. Writely has “hatched” as a small company and now Google can bring their muscle and reach into the table to provide the technology the the masses. This will be interesting …

PS: This post has been written in Writely and posted directly to my blog from Writely.