October 10th, 2006
Office 2.0: GoogleDocs in the works
Mary Jo Foley posts on Steve Bryant's report that tomorrow at the Office 2.0 conference, Google will unveil its GoogleDocs project, which merges Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a unified collaboration suite. Let the games begin. It's not just Google (now GooTube). Zoho, Think Free, JotSpot and other companies are developing browser-based office applications that are bringing a new level of competition and innovation to the market for productivity applications, which ultimately will benefit users. It will also spur Microsoft to get busy turning Works or some set of applications into hosted services. On other hand, pure cloud office applications don't deal well with working offline and are subject to crappy bandwidth, dead zones and outages. Just yesterday Yahoo Mail went dark on me for 30 minutes. Enter the world of trade-offs.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
