While 25k pales into comparison with Microsoft Office registered users (which would run into the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions - anyone have an actual figure for this?), it demonstrates that small Web Office vendors like ThinkFree and Zoho can run a successful 'niche' business by taking a small slice of the total office software user base. Zoho recently noted this in a blog post, saying that "our business plan is not based on us beating Microsoft or Google, it is based on serving customers well enough to earn a profitable share of the market."

ThinkFree markets its office suite as the one with best Microsoft Office compatibility - and I presume they include Google Apps in that assessment. It is also mainly a Java-based solution, rather than Ajax which Zoho and Google predominantly use. ThinkFree Online includes three applications – ThinkFree Write for word processing, ThinkFree Calc for spreadsheet management and ThinkFree Show for creating presentations. It offers 1GB of free file storage as part of its service. In May last year I interviewed ThinkFree CEO TJ Kang. At that stage TJ made a special point of noting ThinkFree's MS compatibility:

"ThinkFree prides itself on having more functionality than the other Web Office players, but TJ told me it isn’t a case of features for features sake. Rather, ThinkFree’s main reason for having so much functionality is to be compatible with Microsoft Office. He said if they didn’t have that level of compatibility, then MS Office users "wouldn’t make the move". One of ThinkFree’s goals is to ween MS Office users off the desktop and onto the Web."

And indeed I concluded that the primary benefit of ThinkFree was its close compatibility to Microsoft Office functionality - with the web-based functionality, such as collaboration, that it offers on top of that being the differentiator to MS.