In a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Google announced yesterday it acquired Upstartle LLC, developers of the web word-processing application Writely. The announcement was first posted on the Official Google Blog, and soon hundreds more blog posts came online — as you can see when you search the topic at the Google Blog Search page. Who says three people and an idea can’t make a difference these days? I guess it’s just more proof this Web 2.0/AJAX world is for real, folks.
Read more about it on the Writely blog, and at the independent Inside Google blog. There’s also much media analysis of this one coming inline. Here are two, from Information Week and CBR Online. This one is definitely a shot heard ’round the Web 2.0 world….
If I recall correctly, Salesforce.com introduced a Writely mashup (tool/feature) recently. I thought that was a shot across the MS bow also.
Next up, an online spreadsheet and 90% of computer users won’t need Office as they don’t use/need all the extended features sitting idle on their systems anyway.
yep – the CBR Online story today (linked in my post) mentions a couple of companies in this space: NumSum.com and iRows.com ….which they say “offer cool little Ajax apps for creating spreadsheets via the browser.”
I’m still waiting to see more about the Salesforce.com/Writely “mashup”; from the screenshots on TechCrunch, it looks like nothing more than a framed-in website. I’m, of course, hoping for a real integration.
Mark, I’m in San Diego for the PC Forum event, which starts later today…
Both Marc Benioff and Bruce Francis are on the attendee list (Marc’s speaking).
I’ll ask one of them if the Writely mashup is going to be a true integration.
To Mark at SalesforceWatch.com and others who may be interested….
Here’s what Bruce Francis, VP Corporate Strategy at Salesforce.com, told me at PC Forum:
“We love Writely and we are enthusiastic about Google’s acquisition of the company. It’s a great product that we feel will have broad appeal, so we will continue to work with them….We have been talking to them a lot. Nothing to announce just yet.”