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Quote:Google has acquired the online word processing company Writely in a move that could bring the search giant into even closer competition with Microsoft.

The acquisition sees Google gain another foothold in the online productivity application arena, in which Microsoft is attempting to position itself in with Office Live...

The move follows speculation about whether Google intends to take on Microsoft's Office productivity suite in some shape or form...

Quote:Has Writely been acquired by Google?

Yes! We are very happy to confirm that we are now part of Google!

How will this change your product plans for Writely?

We haven't yet figured out all the details. Coming to Google will eventually give us a leg up on getting things done that we just haven't been able to with our tiny team. But this will take time - our team isn't going to grow exponentially overnight - so please don't hound us with feature requests any more than you have been already!

When will the site look different?

Not for a while. If you're registered, and you want updates on our progress, make sure you've got "Announcements" turned on in your Settings. You can also check out our Blog for our team musings.

Will you start showing Google ads in my documents?
There are currently no plans to add advertising to the site. If that changes, we'll let folks know...

Quote:What does Writely do?

Writely allows you to edit documents online with whomever you choose, and then publish and blog them online.

What exactly can I do with it?

You can:

    * Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
    * Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to format your documents, spell-check them, etc.
    * Invite others to share your documents (by e-mail address).
    * Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
    * View your documents' revision history and roll back to any version.
    * Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
    * Download documents to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
    * Post your documents to your blog.

Quote:Seems like Google has released Writely.com which is their answer to Word. Registration is open, and you can sign up. I used my Google account and got a confirmation email - however I was able to use the site before I confirmed.

My first experience was not good - as IE had crashed - well it was running at almost 100% CPU and eating all the resources...

I have not used this for a long time, so these are only the first impressions and so far I am more impressed with the collaboration tools than the editor itself. It has all the basic things you would expect - fonts, spellcheck, etc. There are also other a little more advanced features such as the ability to insert comments, manage bookmarks, table and image support. The image can be a maximum of 2mb in size....

Quote:Writely's public release has been expected ever since it closed to begin with, so it's no big surprise. But it looks rather nice, and put it together with Google Spreadsheets, the Google Calendar, Google Talk, and GMail, and you have something that looks a lot like an online version of Microsoft Office. There's no PowerPoint equivalent—yet—and it would be a stretch to call Google Base a competitor to Access. The offerings are also rather spread out at the moment, though that's changing. Spreadsheets are now a part of that little navigation bar in the top left corner of GMail and the Calendar, for example.

Will Google topple the might MS Office suite with these tools? They're usable, cheap—nay, free—and supported by a company with resources almost comparable to those of Microsoft. If Google puts some work into adding the missing features, posihing out the remaining annoyances, and then puts on a major marketing show around the finished product, the unofficial Google Office might actually stand a chance. But it would be a home-user hit only. Corporations would be unlikely to entrust their document handling to a potential rival in exchange for saving a couple hundred dollars per user...