March 10th, 2006
On heels of Writely buy, what of INetWord, Zimbra, WikiCalc?
While everyone focuses on the impact of Google’s Writely acquisition on Microsoft, what does it mean for some of the other best of breed Web-based productivity applications? For example INetWord (which I’ve been writing about recently here and here). Or what about Zimbra (which is often run by third parties as a hosted service). Although the business model for API-driven services in the mashup software economy isn’t well understood yet, Zimbra is definitely ahead of the game here. And then there’s Dan Bricklin’s WikiCalc. By far, probably the coolest marriage of Wiki technology with spreadsheet functionality in a way that creates online collaborative spreadsheets (AJAX-driven). The landgrab is on. The pressure is on (on companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL). It’s like 1999 again. Pre-bubble. The valuations of these offerings and companies (and Box.net because of Google’s GDrive) just skyrocketed. Picks anyone?
