Google Docs has some real competition

While the world is going ooh and ah about the merging of Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a package called Google Docs and Spreadsheets, it may surprise them to know that Google has some serious competitors in the online office productivity space. What’s more, in some cases they're way more advanced than the search leader.

Online software as a service (SaaS) applications have been with us for some time and have been predicted by organizations such as Gartner to gain a sizable chunk of the business applications market by the end of the decade.

In the online office productivity space, however, there are also some emerging products that have been developed. Two examples that readily spring to mind are Zoho and Thinkfree.
Both of the above-mentioned Web 2.0 products, unlike Google, offer the full suite of basic office productivity tools, including a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application. Zoho also offers a free database, a planner, a project management package and, for a monthly rental of US$12, a CRM package.

Thinkfree probably presents the most well integrated package, with a web-based implementation of a virtual filing system for documents that simulates the desktop. Thinkfree also offers off-line users a Java-based desktop Microsoft Office compatible clone for US$50 that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Fedora Core 3 Linux.

As far as solving the needs of offline users, at $50, the Thinkfree Microsoft Office clone sounds interesting. However, Open Office.org 2.0 is free and has already proven itself to be good enough for business use – even if Microsoft says it’s 10 years behind Office 2007.

Like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, neither Zoho nor Thinkfree have really solved the documents storage issue satisfactorily. The Google method of tagging documents is not really the way users are accustomed to organizing their information with the Windows folders based filing system.

Thinkfree makes the best attempt, with a rudimentary web top filing system that simulates the Windows My Documents folder. However, the comparison is superficial, as it’s nowhere near as powerful, not even enabling simple things like folders within folders.

Zoho is reportedly out of beta now, has single sign-on for all its applications and has said that it is working on developing and integrating a web top system.

It’s fairly safe to say that all of the online office productivity tools will do the job if your needs are simple. However, none appear to have quite the industrial strength grunt yet for business strength applications. No doubt, however, they will before too long.

In one respect, however, all of the online office tools totally outshine their desktop equivalents – collaboration. It is so much easier for a group of users to share access to a document that stored in a central location. It sure beats passing it around by email – especially if the file is large.

Thus, we may look forward to a not too distant future, when web access is ubiquitous, in which we are no longer paying through the nose for office productivity software and we no longer care which operating system we’re using.