Web Office Jostling: Google Docs and ZohoX
Both Google and Zoho will be announcing new office product offerings at tomorrow's Office 2.0 conference. Steve Bryant from eWeek reports:
"Google will announce tomorrow at the Office 2.0 conference a new product called Google Docs, which will merge Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a collaboration and document management solution, according to sources."
Google Docs will be available at docs.google.com. Writely and Google Spreadsheets already offer export to blog and other formats - and have similar sharing functionality. So this seems like common sense to merge the two products together. But once again, it all seems a tad unimaginative and piecemeal from Google - as with Google Apps for Your Domain; which bundles together Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Page Creator. As always with Google, who knows what is around the corner. A full Web Office Suite must be in the works and it's probably just that all the pieces of the jigsaw aren't ready yet - they don't have online presentations and project management products yet.
Meanwhile a small company that does have all the pieces, Zoho, is going to push out a new version of Zoho Virtual Office. Techcrunch is reporting that it "will integrate most of the 10+ Zoho services already available and add several more like Webmail and calendaring." As of now, the product includes web-based collaboration groupware such as email, documents and calendar. So it appears it'll be upgraded to include the rest of the Zoho product range (spreadsheets, presentations, etc). If you want a quick tour of all these apps, check out my Image Gallery on ZDNet.
As I noted earlier this week, Zoho is planning a full Web Office Suite. But I'm a little confused by the branding here, as it's being called ZohoX as well. So is this a new brand, or an upgrade of the existing Zoho Virtual Office?
Zoho Projects, their online project management tool, also went out of Beta yesterday. There's no question then that Zoho has all the products required for a full web-based suite, so in that sense they are a step ahead of Google - and Microsoft. But the space is still fairly immature and so a lot of jostling for position is going on.
Related posts: Zoho Web Office Suite Image Gallery; Office 2.0 Podcast Jam Kicks Off; Zoho Moving Towards A Full Web Office Suite
Disclaimer: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor
UPDATE: Google Docs & Spreadsheets (another great name) is now live.
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Hmm... would you really entrust your documents to an "Online Colloboration [sic] suite"?
Posted by: Juha | October 10, 2006 10:31 PM
It's a new feature Juha, an Anti-Spell Checker. Comes in very handy for blogging ;-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 10, 2006 10:35 PM
Richard:
Zoho X is just to simplify things (hopefully we wont confuse users with this). Saying 'Zoho Virtual Office' is too long and too complicated to type in your browser. www.zohox.com should be much simpler to type. Thats the actual thought behind this.
Raju Vegesna
Posted by: Raju Vegesna | October 10, 2006 10:55 PM
it really seems to me that Zoho has been getting incredible leeway. maybe not individually on this blog (I haven't studied it that closely), but certainly across this blog and TechCrunch and the others that Zoho is advertising on/sponsoring. and i still think this blog and Techcrunch and others need to do a better job of disclosing relationships. to me, the disclosure must happen inline - with at least a short reference of some type saying 'look here for more details on why you should be extra suspect of whatever i am about to tell you about this company'. And what happens two or three years from now when Zoho has been sold for scrap to whoever and we read this post and have no idea that Zoho was sponsoring R/WWeb at the time of this blog post? Or what happens if you read this post today, in a feed reader where we can't see the massive Zoho sponsor ad in the upper right of the screen?
i know this is partly due to immature and evolving technologies, but watching this Zoho case is pretty convincing for me - we need standard and pervasive disclosure/attribution, and we need it yesterday.
i heard of a startup doing copyright tracking/etc. (http://www.attributor.com/), but I don't know if they plan to cover discosure stuff, too.
obviously, every conflict of interest can't be disclosed - where would all major corporate media outlets actually put the news? - but there _is_ room for more and better discosure. we shouldn't settle for what the existing mass media has provided - very little.
and to make my point, i found this disclaimer at the end of this post:
Disclaimer: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor
that's a great start, but how about putting it at the top of the post? wouldn't that make a whole lot more sense? of course, it would. that way i'd know how to treat this post - as something written by someone who has strong financial ties to the entity being reviewed. instead, i read the whole thing, form my impressions, and then discover that, alas, i should be super-skeptical of this review because of the severe conflict of interest.
one of the first things you learned from studying this current White House was their media management. there are any number of techniques the Bush White House uses to shape public opinion about their product. For instance, Saturday new dumps for all bad news. Massive fake terror pressers whenever another Republican gets accused of pursuing little children (that's not hyperbole - we're up to what? - five sexual predators in this Administration that have been outed so far?). As I said - myriad techniques. And what is the net effect of all these techniques if, at the end of the day, the truth comes out anyway? Well, the effect is that the truth never gets out as big as the untruth. A massive headline runs some paid-for or subtly-influenced report, and then runs a mini-correction on page C16 a few days later. By then, it's too late - everyone in Ameica already think Saddam has WMD.
The disclosure line needs to go up top.
Posted by: Peter | October 13, 2006 3:55 PM
Thanks Peter, I see your point and I will in future articles put any disclosures at the top of the post.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 13, 2006 5:35 PM