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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