Writely.com Beta - Google's Answer to Word

bahree writes "Google has launched their beta version of Writely.com. Writely is their word processor and answer to Microsoft Word. In addition to the usual editing features it includes many collaboration features, as well as the ability to save documents as PDFs and RSS feeds."

Comments

One step closer...

[ack154]

... to a complete office suite. I've been using the Google Spreadsheets for a little while from the link in my Gmail account. Signed up for Writely the other day when I saw it on Ars. Pretty neat for an online application. Not too much left for a nice office productivity suite, excpet maybe a database app and/or a presentation app.

Re:One step closer...

[JFMulder]

Well, I believe that Microsoft's Share Point initiative is something similar to what Google might be about to unleash. The only difference would be that Microsoft's costs more. This might be an interesting thing to implement in Open Office or any other open source office application. As far as availability, my preference is to have my USB key in my pocket to bring stuff around. I wouldn't put anything important on Google's servers, because of privacy issues. For example, I'd never put my budget spreadsheet in Google's Spreadsheet even it was the best application ever. There's just some data that is more convenient to be private than to be accessible.

Re:One step closer...

[mshiltonj]

As a business, you might find it useful to buy a "Google Office Box" to install on your network. This preconfigured works-out-of-the-box hardware/software product will run your small office's email, calendaring, search, spreadsheets and documents. It also comes with with a great Service Level Agreeement backed by Certified Google Technicians.

Need more horsepower? Add another box, change a couple configuration settings, and the load is distributed - it scales horizontally.

Since its all server-side and browser based, it fits seamlessly into you current environment. Training shouldn't be a showstopper. Heck, many of your employees are probably already using a couple of the consumer versions these services already.

It won't be long until it comes time to upgrade your offices desktop PCs. You won't need any Office licences any more. No more Exchange Server. In fact (as your Google account representives tells you) there's this Ubuntu Linux package that may even make all those Windows licences uncessary. They can refer you to a Canonical account representative.

Re:One step closer...

[Robotech_Master]

Writely's real-time collaboration, in my opinion, leaves something to be desired.

I'm used to using MoonEdit, which, while only a text editor, is a fully collaborative one. You see the letters appear the instant they are typed, unlike with Writely which seems to update chunks of paragraph every thirty seconds or so.

And MoonEdit puts each contributor's typing in a different color, so you can easily tell at a glance what's yours and what's theirs.

Re:What?!

[Jugalator]

No Safari support either, which may actually affect more users than the lack of Opera support, despite Firefox's popularity on Mac.

Writely.com vs. my 3 evening hack KBdocs.com

[MarkWatson]

And the winner is: Writely!
I wrote about Writely a few days ago (and generally liked it). I wrote my own online word processor last year (KBdocs.com for my own use, then opened up free registration - got 1000+ uesers. My system was a 3 evening hack - generally OK, but not feature rich.
Google Calendars has a huge advantage because of the GMail integration. Writely.com's advantage will likely be a good integration with blogspot, etc.

The Truth About Browser Support

[Jahz]

One of my friends worked for Google up until a few weeks ago. We discussed this issue a few times as I would criticize the big G for not supporting sarafi/konquerer as fast as IE/FF. If you remember Google Maps initial beta, you should recall that it had pretty poor browser support. In, fact this has been a theme throughout many Google betas. The truth is that when Google says "beta" they really mean "proof of concept." I guess people would rather use Betas than POCs for the obvious reasons.

You and I say "why can't this support safari,oper,konquerer?" The whole cross-platform concept is very very expensive. It requires developers, testers, a qa qualification process, time, etc. All that is waaay to much (even for a rich company) to invest in every project. Add into this mix the fact that most of Google Labs' ambitious projects... well... fade gracefully into the night... it's just not worth it.

We're all familiar with the process by now. Google releases a new Beta. People use it, or they don't. After a few months, if enough interest remains, Google will start putting some muscle behind its beta. Other ideas don't get so popular and never escape the Google Labs page. (though they don't exactly die either... more like a deep sleep) There are many examples of underdeveloped proof of concept projects at http://labs.google.com/ like the really cool Google Ride Finder. The world just isnt ready for that yet.

Also see Google Suggest, the oldest remaining beta (4 years!!). It's downright crappy webpage is a front for an underdeveloped topic detection algorithm. I wish they'd finish it or open the source :)

The price of not having your software freedom.

[jbn-o]

Although you mean price when you say "free", it is interesting to note what Google's online services deprive you of.

I'm not free to run Writely on my own LAN so that my LAN users don't have to reveal the content of their documents to Google. For all I know, Google will leak a user's information and I'd rather not give them so much information to work with. They say they "take security very seriously" in their Writely tour but I can't prevent a disgruntled Google employee from distributing copies of information I've written with Writely except to not give them that information in the first place.

I'm also not free to modify Writely to suit my needs. So if I want to run the service on a machine in my house and provide that service to myself over the Internet, I can't make sure that the program does what I want it to do.

Most of the services Google offers are unimaginative and simply not attractive when one considers that they're indexing everything you do with them so that they can build saleable profile on you and possibly inadvertantly leak information to others. I'd rather run locally-hosted free software programs like OpenOffice.org.

Price is the least of their differences....

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Nah, the difference will be that Microsoft will bloat their offerings so much they won't fit through the office door. Google keeps `em down to the most utilized features -- those worth cramming into an Ajax app.

Privacy issues are a legitimate concern no doubt, but let me tell you: I'm a full time developer on the MS stack - including SharePoint - and the last thing in the world I'd ever want to have to use on a regular basis is a SharePoint portal. I've seen plenty of abandoned SP implementations, mainly over complexity, learning curve and sluggishness of navigation. I've seen none fully utilized.

If Google realizes how many concerns they'd ease by offering strong crypto, I think they'd win over that fraction of the market who, like you, are holding out over privacy conerns. For example, if they offered encrypted storage whereby they had only the public and not the private keys to the stored documents, I'd be fine with storing just about anything on their servers.