Growing choice in the low cost office suite market

Google is taking baby steps towards offering a suite of "office" applications. Last night, Google's collaborative word processing tool, Writely, warned users of a planned outage; this morning my Writely documents appeared in the same list as my Google spreadsheets under the new docs.google.com domain.

For small firms, the competition in the office application market is good news. The new players give us advantages not associated with the dominant office suite: collaboration, choice and savings. (For bigger firms it is good news as well and they should start experimenting with the capabilities but switching costs will prevent them from taking advantage of the offerings at this moment.)

First, the collaboration aspect. The new tools support the people part of the process, the fact that documents are rarely written, from start to finish, by a single person. In the past, big firms would email iterations of documents marked "draft" to their clients, today, smart firms invite their clients to participate in the drafting process. Simultaneous access is becoming the norm to eliminate the version and logistics nightmare of file sharing, reducing time to deliver and to increase acceptance.

The choice aspect means that as more players launch viable contenders, we get to choose the right tool for the job. Already there is Zoho, ThinkFree and Google Docs & Spreadsheets (awful name, and Google will have to change it as they add new formats, but they seem keen to avoid the Office label) and others.

As for savings, the good news is that many of these services are free. For now at least. I suspect some will adopt a "freemium" model where users pay for advanced features or extra storage.

Or we will see offline versions of the same software that you can buy and install locally. Most of the action today is in online services where an always-on connection is required and the software is confined to what the browser is capable of. Give me stand-alone versions of the software packages capable of synchronising with my library of online, collaboration-enabled documents and it is a combination I would happily pay for. That would beat my current free combination of locally installed NeoOffice (Mac only) with manual upload/download interfaced to an online collaborative service.

[If you don't collaborate with others then the online offerings are yet not a match for the slick, feature rich environments we are used to on the desktop - as this writer for Techworld finds out. (Thanks to Michael Sampson for discovering this article.)]

Tags: Google Writely Zoho ThinkFree collaboration office apps office 2.0 small firms small business