Office ain't Dead Yet

Michael Arrington suggests AjaxWrite can be an Office killer. I'm skeptical. Sure, most people are buying the whole Office cow when all they want is the Word milk. But in pointing to Om's headscratching over a business model, Mike says,

"If people start using this as an alternative to Word, money can easily be made on advertising around the site, with a premium paid version."

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice fast little app without all the Word bloat. But I'll tell you, I can't ever see wanting to put up with ads when I'm in true writing mode. While reading/writing/surfing the Web. Fine. But if I'm working on the Great American Novel (and, of course, I am) I don't want the distraction. A premium version? Maybe. But I didn't buy office for my Dell and I still got WordPerfect with it. It may be very 80s, but it works fine for me.

I also have my doubts when he says,

"Will things like AjaxWrite have an impact on Microsoft’s Office revenues over time? Yeah, it must. Even so, Bill Gates says that he just doesn’t understand our infatuation with thin client versions of Word. That may be true, but at some point I expect Microsoft to come out with ad supported versions of their own clients…they’ll just wait, of course, until they have to. And Google has pushed the envelope with its recent acquisition of Writely."

I'm not that impressed with Google's history of handling acquisitions. Blogger's nice, but Microsoft was the Johnny-come-lately here and Spaces is booming. Picassa is nice, but not a category killer by any means. Keyhole had great results. Dodgeball hasn't really scaled to Google-type numbers, or has it? Orkut's useless. I'm not saying its Writely purchase won't keep the Office team up nights, but the track record is too patchy to assume the magic of Google search will rub off on this latest purchase.