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May 22, 2009

Microsoft Word, Google Docs...and Zoho Writer?

Microsoft Word, Google Docs...and Zoho Writer?

Marc Tracy

bizbox.slate.com

Summary

We at BizBox are, of course, devoted to looking out for and celebrating small businesses. Additionally, we have long held that one way s

We at BizBox are, of course, devoted to looking out for and celebrating small businesses. Additionally, we have long held that one way small businesses can level the playing field, which in many ways tilts towards larger firms, is through cloud computing, and so we have been big proponents of cloud computing. What all this means is that when we find out about a single entity that awesomely combines the two, you can be sure we'll flag it.


In this case, an article in the New York Times alerted us to Zoho Writer, a word processor that combines the convenience of Google Docs, which is cloud-based but can be used offline, with some of the frills of the collosus of the word-processor division, Microsoft Word. (We're big Google Docs fans, yet we do frequently find ourselves frustrated by its major service gaps: what we mean to say is, it doesn't even have a word count!) Zoho Writer is put out by AdventNet, a small, privately-held Silicon Valley firm.


Much of the article dwells on the fact that if Microsoft thinks it can continue its dominance with a suite of firmly, rigidly offline software, it is dreaming (a point we made in discussing Google Chrome, the browser).


But mostly, the article--check it out--can be appreciated as a nice, small (at least smaller) businss success story. Zoho Writer has managed to carve out a niche between two of the tech industry's true software giants, Microsoft and Google. Not bad.


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