Just a week after acquiring online telephony service GrandCentral, Google has announced
the $625M purchase of Postini - a company that offers "on-demand communications security
and compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users
worldwide." The press release noted:
"Postini's services -- which include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement -- can be used to protect a company's email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications."
Google's Web Office ambitions are being well and truly fleshed out in 2007. CEO Eric Schmidt says that "with this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes." In other words, Google Apps isn't just for small and medium sized businesses anymore.
Google's 2007 acquisition spree has continued, with the acquisition of GrandCentral - a service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. Interestingly, Google says they bought GrandCentral because it fits well with their other services that "enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users." In other words, this is yet another Web Office play from Google.
In today's increasingly virtual and fragmented workforce, a service such as GrandCentral is an ideal complement to other Web Office tools such as GTalk, Gmail and Docs&Spreadsheets. As Josh Catone wrote in his post Rolling Your Own Online Office, the key to a successful distributed team is communication. And GrandCentral is a service that makes telephone communication much easier and gives more control to the user - e.g. you can set rules as to what calls you accept and when, and even hear why someone is calling before taking the call.
It's possible the iPhone launch on Friday 29 June is more hype than substance - indeed the current poll we're running on R/WW has only 20% of respondants interested in buying an iPhone as soon as it's released! 41% have no plans to buy one and a further 18% said they'll never buy one. The poll is below, if you'd like to have your say. Nevertheless, there is a flurry of web development activity around the iPhone. One of the more surprising aspects of this is that enterprise apps are being built for, or ported to, the iPhone.
Less than 12 hours after we posted our review of the Web Office Suite space, Google has seemingly put the last piece of the jigsaw in place for their suite. Today Google announced it has acquired the assets of Zenter, "a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations." This technology will be added to Tonic Systems, a technology for presentation creation and document conversion. Tonic Systems was acquired in April by Google. Nick Gonzalez says that "Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features", so it will be a nice complement to Tonic.
This morning Zoho will release their latest Web Office app, Meeting, as a public beta. It's a good opportunity to consider what progress each of the main Web Office vendors is making towards a full Web Office Suite. For this post, we'll consider Google Apps, Microsoft Office Live, Zoho, ThinkFree, and Zimbra. There are others of course, but these are (I hope you'll agree) the main players.
Also, later in this post we compare Zoho's Web Office apps with Google Apps. These two companies have the most apps so far, so it's a good indicator of progress in the space (remembering that Microsoft is yet to release a truly compelling Web Office Suite - and no, Office Live in its current incarnation doesn't count).
Last week we profiled eyeOS, which had just launched its 1.0 version. This week the eyeOS team contacted me to claim that a new competitor, MyBooo, has broken the Open Source license of eyeOS 0.9.x and is using it as a base for their project.
The WebOS space is made up of a number of small startups, many of them in Europe, and it seems to be prone to flare ups and disagreements between developers. In May 2006 I blogged that eyeOS claimed Orca was vaporware - and a heated discussion took place. Part of the issue there was confusion about whether Orca is open source, which is the bone of contention with MyBooo too.
Hong Kong based EditGrid, a leading online spreadsheet that has also partnered with other Web Office startups, has just closed its Series A funding of $1.25M from WI Harper. We confirmed this with the founder and CEO, David Lee.
EditGrid, which we last covered in February 2007, was built by the 8-person company Team and Concepts Limited (TnC). The actual development of EditGrid began in January 2006 with funding from Silicon Valley-based angel investors and matching funds from the Hong Kong government. EditGrid was actually present in this market before Google Spreadsheets. Its public beta was launched in April 2006, two months before Google launched Google Spreadsheets. EditGrid got out of beta on 14 February, 2007 and then launched its subscription services. Since then, EditGrid has been partnering with a large variety of partners world-wide. Currently EditGrid has partnerships with Central Desktop, Salesforce, ShareMethods, StartForce and ThinkFree.
I've had a thing for WebOS products for quite some time. I first reviewed one of their number, EyeOS, in August 2006. Recent WebOS reviews I've done on Read/WriteWeb include DesktopOnDemand and Blake Ross of Firefox fame's Parakey. Also Emre Sokullu wrote a popular article on the still mythical GoogleOS, last November.
eyeOS hails from Spain and was one of the early entries into a market that, as yet, has little evidence of profitability. However eyeOS now boasts 120,518 users (compared to 53,500 in August 2006), so it is ramping up well.
Egnyte is a collaborative document sharing app that hopes to make inroads on the growing Web Office space. It's kind of like a mix between an online storage solution (such as Omnidrive or ElephantDrive) and a content management solution. In enterprise speak, essentially it's a knowledge management application. The company started in January 2006 and launched the Egnyte private beta in May/June '06. It launched its public beta around the time of Web 2.0 Expo, in April 2007.
Egnyte downplays the online storage aspects on its homepage, where the noted features are "sharing, automatic organization and a powerful search capability". Another feature is that Egnyte synchronizes the files on your desktop with those on the web (in the Egnyte app). So let's explore more what Egynte is and why people might use it.
At the end of January, we reported on a new "preview product" called Zoho Notebook. Well tonight it has launched as a beta product. In the office software space nowadays, comparisons must be made not only to the equivalent Microsoft Office product - but also the equivalent Google Web Office product. Not forgetting of course the many smaller vendors of Web Office. In any case, when it came out in preview Zoho Notebook was immediately compared to Microsoft's OneNote application and
Google Notebook. My own conclusion when trying out the product back then was that Zoho Notebook offered different things than Microsoft OneNote and more things than Google Notebook.
