Steve Gillmor of Gillmor Gang (he also has a Gillmore daily) is probably the biggest believer in web 2.0 and web apps as being the future of computing. He would host a Microsoft developer and say it on his face: “MS Office is dead”! Steve would always support his argument with examples like writely. I would add NumSum and gOffice, maybe also Kiko.
Today TechCrunch has an exclusive coverage by Nik Cubrilovic on Salesforce business mashups. AppExchange is the application platform of Salesforce, which includes a large number of application. Of course, it includes applications that can talk to your Outlook and other standard known applications. But the news today is that writely has been included within the AppExchange platform! Other applications that were added include Adobe online PDF generator (which I recall works only for US users), Skype and Google Maps.
So is it really happening! Is MS Office going to die soon, or basically dead by now! Of course, we have Office 12 on the way. I have seen Office 12, and it looks much better. They basically gave it a fabulous facelift. But the significance of Salesforce adopting writely is that the best arguments against people who believe MS Office is dead are to corporate users being not so sure about putting their work online. Well, now with Salesforce adopting writely, those arguments may become history. Of course, Salesforce is another example of web apps, which is extremely successful. I would say the information on Salesforce is more sensitive than a .doc files.
Personally, I would still prefer using MS Office or any offline app as opposed to something like writely. But if the world becomes more connected to the internet; more wifi access and faster internet, then I would consider the shift.
Related links:
Dabble DB
Rallypoint
Zoho
Form Assembly
Mosuki
Calender Hub (boring name!)
Skobee
zvents
