With the Office 2.0 Conference underway, we can expect a flurry of announcements, product launches in the next two days – no wonder that two companies, Zoho and Google jumped ahead and “preannounced”.
Zoho is releasing new products at a breakneck speed (see my recent posts From Office Suite to Business Suite and One is More than Six: Zoho Suite Single Sign-on): today’s announcement (well, strictly speaking, tomorrow’s but TechCrunch already reported it) is the availability of ZohoX, the online version of Zoho Virtual Office, a communication / collaboration product. The TechCrunch review is extensive; so instead of writing a “me-too” review, let me ponder about what it means.
I already declared the Zoho Suite complete when they added Show (think PowerPoint) to the previously existing Sheet (can you say Excel?) and Writer (you know this one…). As we will most likely witness at the Office 2.0 Conference starting tomorrow, the number of contenders in the online Office space is mushrooming. Most are one-product wonders though. Of course one can pick the “best-of-breed” (or favorite?) individual applications, deal with different sites, different UI, and different sign-on information, and still not enjoy the seamless flow and real-time data updates that Zoho demonstrated between the spreadsheet, database, document and presentation. But then we haven’t talked about email / communication / virtual desktop yet: with ZohoX, to the best of my knowledge Zoho is the only on to be able to offer a full combo. That’s still not the end of story; Zoho has products in the world of transactional, “enterprise” software: Zoho CRM actually encompasses CRM + ERP functions, essentially covering all business functions except accounting.
All these are free now, and CEO Sridhar Vembu maintains there will always be a free version for individuals. So how will Zoho make money? They will have multiple options: enterprise software guru Vinnie Mirchandani considers the Office Suite a good candidate to be used even by large enterprises, and if they so chose, they will also be able to become a unique provider of full business solutions (Office, Communication, ERP+CRM) to small businesses.
Google’s announcement isn’t really a new product, more the merger / integration of their in-house developed spreadsheet and Writely, a capable online editor acquired in the spring. I was lucky enough (or so I thought) to be invited to a pre-announcement briefing in the company of Mike Arrington, Steve Gilmor, Rafe Needleman and a few other bloggers. This turned out to be a good lesson: if you accept the invitation and play the game, you get to be the last one to write about the news: by the time we sat down, the embargoed release was leaked. The announcement itself is quite underwhelming, the most significant part is the fact that it’s coming from Google: Writely and Google Spreadsheet is now one product, under the fantastic (?) name of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. As (if) Google adds new products, I wonder if the name will evolve to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations, then to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations&Databases.. etc.
About the only improvement is the ability to list, search, sort, tag ..etc all files, be it text or spreadsheet together is certainly nice, but that’s where integration ends at this point. The Googlers mentioned users with up to a thousand documents – there has to be a more intuitive way to list them than a simple alphabetical list – for example grouping by tags (labels in gmail terminology).
I regret losing Writely’s “face” – the new appearance is corporate blue uniform that could have been done by IBM, and as for the name, it would make Microsoft’s naming guys proud ….
All in all, I can’t get excited by this – the recent Google Groups announcement was far more positive, IMHO, although it largely went unnoticed.
Update (9/12): Watch this ScobleVid…
Tags: zoho, zoho suite, zohox, zhoho virtual office, google, google docs & spreadsheets, writely, google groups, office 2.0, office20con
How are all these sites going to make money?