Fighting M$

I use WinXP and don't have any unbearable problems with it(fingers crossed). I am very much interested in seeing alternate solutions for everything. The alternative is always cheaper and comes with a huge coolness quotient. :-) This the probably one of the most important reasons (other than the performance) for Linux to be as popular as it is today.

Coming to Micro$oft, though WinXP brings in money and the delayed Vista will probably be just as much a money making machine, the real milking cow is the Office product suite. Do they make money on it or what! Even a Linux fan will have to agree that the Office Suite is very good and OpenOffice though a good substitute is still only a substitute. So, it was obvious for anyone who wants to dent M$ will attack this market. The biggies like google, oracle, sun and also a host of Web2.0 companies are targeting this growing market space!

There are two clear leaders in this market. One is Zoho and other is Writely. There is also the JotSpot service which presents the same online stuff in wiki format. Google has tried its bit at eating into the M$ pie. It started the mail service, the chat service, the spreadsheet service etc etc. They have seen this as the possible opportunity to hurt M$ where it hurts and they have bought Writely.

Though this online document editing and simultaneous editing etc. are good features, would the enterprises(where the money lies) really want to keep their sensitive data with a 3rd party? This is the biggest problem with these kinda solutions and this probably could be solved with some high level NDA/SLA's. This again points to whether Web2.0 apps will ever penetrate the real market or forever stay a consumer fad.

Categorized As:

• Tech
• Web2.0