by Aner Ravon
[Proper Disclusure - this post was written using Zoho Writter]
Last week I wrote about online Spreadsheets. If you recall, the best and final round was between Google and Zoho and Google came up as the winner. When it comes to word processing though, Zoho Writer is my personal favorite , hands down. If I could use only one word to describe why it would be maturity. Zoho writer is simply a mature online word processor. Many vendors face a creativity block when it comes to migrating traditional desktop applications to the web. I noticed it with many spreadsheet applications that were simply mimicking excel. Zoho seems to have passed that hurdle long ago and this is all over the app - from the big feature through the “little things” that make the difference.
Let’s start with the overall feeling. Zoho Writer loads up quickly and makes you feel like you are using desktop software. You get oriented immediately with familiar looking toolbars on top and with an action dashboard on the left. The toolbars offer the exact blend of options required for editing a document in an online environment. From basic (alignment, bullets and numbering, spelling) to more advanced (insert functions, special characters , tables). The left hand dashboard offers easy navigation through shared documents, personalized templates and online storage. We talk a lot about the “offline problem” when web services are concerned. Zoho is well aware of the problem and offers back up options in a number of ways, from emailing to local saving of the file in a wide array of formats - Word, PDF, Text and HTML. They all work well and I really appreciated the PDF option.
Zoho has spiced Zoho Writer with the right dosage of web ingredients. You can easily post a document directly to a blog (Blogger, Live journal, TypePad and WordPress). Neat! You can create your own web templates very easily - just use “Save as template”, no need to go through the “xxx.dot” horror! You can also tag your document the “web 2.0″ way. Gil and I did experience a few hiccups until we figured how to use the sharing properly. The locking mechanism is not intuitive enough, Gil didn’t get the sharing invite to his Google account and we had to spend good 15 minutes before we figured it out. Note to Zoho - work on it!
Then come the little things that make the real difference. The overall user experience which is fantastic. Simple but not style free. The Spell checker that works so nicely. The autosaving you don’t need to remember. The emoticons, history, very functional bottom toolbar, right bland of AJAX….I’m sold!
Yes, Zoho Writer is my Word processor from now. I only wonder how the guys at Zoho plan to keep up with Google once their word processing is out (and it will be out). Zoho offers a full suite of online office apps which I haven’t checked yet - Planner, CRM, Chat, Calendar, Notes. Perhaps the answer is there. I am a little mind boggled by it all being provided for free, but I certainly hope the folks at Zoho have a plan. I’d really like them to stick around.
Aner Ravon
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Besides Google and zoho, for online office application, there are various online spreadsheets working in different directions, includes EditGrid and Numbler which you may want to take a look. They incorporated reat-time-update which distinguishes themself from the others.
You may visit EditGrid_v._Google which shows a comparison between EditGrid and Google Spreadsheets.
06.23.06 @ 2:26 amThis will be a tough uphill battle for Zoho and the rest. For some reason I ended up subscribed to just about any IT magazin out there - from eWeek to Network Computing etc. The IT/Enterprise world seems to be totally ignorant/ignoring the web 2.0/web services phenomena. Yes, Software as a Service is preached, SOA is implemented, but it seems that IT managers are still looking for traditional channels/vendors - MSFT, HP, Oracle etc.
The only services that come to my mind that have gained some attention revolve around enterprise messaging - AJAX technology, Zimbra and so on.
Then again, it took open source several years to break into mainstream IT, perhaps it is simply a matter of time for the adoption curve to hit the enterprise market for what are (now) mostly end user/consumer oriented applications.
You raise an interesting subject. I am also subscribed to many IT magazines, and to be honest, my impression is that IT managers as well as journalists are mostly fighting yesterday’s war. Their idea of software as a service is usually confined to the same software, only hosted + SLA. That is such a conservative way of thinking about it - can’t we all tell by now that software needs to be different if it is to be served as a service? Is there any point to hosted powerpoint? to hosted word? of course not! There is huge value, though, to “usage based billing” for example. To knowledge sharing. To collaboration across different organizations. There is a huge opportunity in delivering enterprise software to SMEs through the economies of scale offered by a service rather than software, and so forth.
The online world, which is responsible for the whole “software as a service” bonne tonne, puts a totally different equation in front of the modern organization and their derived IT policies. IT managers are usually the last to realise that, and it’s not their fault. The way it will penetrate, IMO, is a result of two shaping factors, (1) actions of opinion leaders like Google (2)organizations winning as a result of up to date technologies. It takes time, but it WILL happen.
06.23.06 @ 6:16 pm[…] I know i aint a big fan of online wordprocessors , But i went and tried zoho writer after Aner told me to start spell checking my posts and i went and done it just to get a feel of web 2.0 life , I opened an account and started writing , Its a nice service i gatto give you that but the thing i most expected ‘Post to blog’ simply failed and made me close that tab . […]
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Aner, Thanks for the post! To answer your question “How do we propose to keep up with Google”, even in Search, smaller search providers like Ask.com have survived and prospered in the last few years, with Google’s dominant presence. Zoho has a strong engineering team, and it is part of AdventNet, a company with a 10 year track record of profitable growth, so we are starting on a good note.
Our plan is to keep the base edition of Zoho applications free, and charge for a higher end business-oriented edition. We are already doing that successfully in Zoho VO and Zoho CRM, with numerous paying customers. We have analyzed the numbers, and they do add up, so we will be around
We are right now focused on getting Zoho Writer and other applications out of beta. Stay tuned!
Sridhar Vembu
06.22.06 @ 2:09 pm