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Google Enters Web-Office Market

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looking-forward-to-online-clippy dept.

jaiva writes "Google's official blog tells us that Google has acquired Writely, a collaborative word processor." From the article: "To be clear, Writely is still in beta, and it's far from perfect. Upholding our great user experience means everything to us, so we're not accepting new registrations until we've moved Writely to Google's software architecture. If you're interested in giving us a try, we hope you'll get on the waitlist so we can let you know when you'll be able to try out Writely."

5 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. wiki killer? by keilinw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd really be interested in something along these lines... but with wiki integration! How cool would that be? WYSIWIG wiki, end user focused, and with security features.... so that even dumb people could use it... err.. I think thats what this is huh?

    --Matt Wong
    http://www.themindofmatthew.com

  2. pieces of a puzzle... by pvt_medic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While there is great debate about googles master plan or if it has one. The whole concept that they make things and then try to make them profitable. The more i see their actions the more a threat to almost every element of the PC industry they present.
    1-Online Storage
    2-Office Suite Program
    3-Data Search
    4-E-Mail, Chat
    5-Entertainment (Video, Photos)
    6-Online Sales ?7?-Games?? (is this a possibility down the line) A large sector with big potential

    I'll be honest I am one who thinks that eventually we are going to be returning to dummy terminals, a lot of these items would support that. I think they have a bigger plan, and I think we are beginning to see pieces that fit together. But also they have one or two more cards they havent played yet.

    --
    30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
    Score:5, Troll
  3. Right Direction by whois_drek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is certainly a step in the right direction. I'm interested in automatic document generation, and it's a coincidence that Peter Norvig gave a talk at a colloquium here at BYU this morning. I asked him if he thought Google would ever get into the business of automatically generating documents using their 500 TB of data as a source (i.e. automatically created Wikipedia articles on any subject). He said no, because of copyright issues and the like, but it'll be interesting to see how "Writely" turns out. It seems like it's a stepping stone to completely automated document generation, and might yield some good ideas.

  4. Mentions "secure" several times, but no SSL! by rklrkl · · Score: 3, Interesting
    What I really don't like about Writely (apart from the fact that you really don't want to upload/type in anything confidential into it!) is that it makes a big deal about security:

    * Home page says "Store your documents securely online."

    * Sign-in page says "Simple & secure document collaboration and publishing"

    So if it's so secure, why isn't SSL used *anywhere* on the site? The even more strange thing is that there is a secure cert on the site at https://www.writely.com/ but nothing actually links to it...ho hum. Yes, you can indeed login via SSL if you want - apparently they're worried about server load if they made SSL the default... Maybe with the Google infrastructure behind them, they can turn on SSL by default?

  5. Re:Writely Technology? by pebs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Writely is based upon ASP.NET.
    Will this save them appreciable time? They will have to do a rewrite or be based on Microsoft technology (yeah, right).

    I doubt they will do a rewrite. Probably get it running in Mono/Linux if anything. Orkut is written in ASP.Net, but I believe they run it in Mono/Linux.

    --
    #!/