"Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven’t taken the world by storm, and how you’re going to beat that."
The author needs to deal with this head-on.
To some extent he addresses it implicitly by talking about gaining traction the same way Facebook did. This implies that the author thinks that existing web Office tools haven't gained traction because they're too diffusely targeted. The author seems to think that if a web Office tool had a clustered communities of users, this would somehow drive adoption of a web Office replacement. This is an interesting idea, but I think it's inadequately motivated in the writeup. Do college students comprise the right population for these sorts of clusters? I don't think so. I think college students collaborate too infrequently for them to bother adopting such a tool, especially on projects requiring Office-like functionality. If they need to collaborate in this way (once or twice in their career?) they'll just email each other Office documents, or maybe use Google Docs.
You caught me, man! I actually did have a few paragraphs tackling this but to be perfectly honest A) it was really boring and B) given my status as an MS employee I do need to be a little careful with what I say around this. Not even so much around pro-Microsoft stuff, but more around stuff that is against efforts that our competitors are doing. In other words, to fully address this I'd have to talk smack on Google docs, which could be seen as what we like to call in the consulting world as a CLM (career limiting move) :)
That being said, anyone who has been using web-based Office alternatives and wants to address this, I'd love to hear thoughts either here or within the comments in the original post.
It's a huge market, and it's uncracked despite user pain. Why?
It's a boring question in terms of technology, but not in terms of thinking about user needs and behavior. And it's pretty interesting in terms of the amount of money that could flow if the market were cracked, too.
I think the two big reasons the Office market remains uncracked are:
1) incompatibility fears
2) opportunity cost
Incompatibility fear is a big one. A good friend refuses to use MS Office for Mac because she is afraid of incompatibilities. This is rational. The documents she's sending out impinge on multimillion dollar deals, some of which get finalized at the 11th hour. She can't tolerate additional risk in her workflow.
Continuing to use her, and Office for Mac, as an example, "opportunity cost" means that she can bill to her clients at a pretty good hourly rate, or she can spend her time learning about and deploying Parallels and Bootcamp so she could enjoy OS X and still be confident that her Office documents will be viewable and editable by her colleagues. This just isn't a good use of her time, unless she happens to enjoy technical puttering (she doesn't).
I think she's pretty emblematic of this problem. If you can't get her to use an web-based Office substitute, I submit that you haven't cracked the Office market.
I think that this problem is harder, and in some ways more interesting, than the technical problem of how to make a nifty Office-like web app.
I think that online office tools (Google docs, zoho) are slow and extremely tedious. They are pretty looking, but usability is worse (slower) than the 1987 versions of word processors on PCs.
I think office alternatives will have to gain traction on other devices (read: low-cost browser-only computers, fancy mobile devices), and from there attack the regular consumer market. There is just no reason to use a web based alternative if MS office is accessible.
Same thing could have been said about Facebook re: MySpace. :)
Seriously though, this is a good point. Any time you go up against a competitor with a product in market, billions in the bank, and a huge incentive to make there product succeed at all costs, you better have a pretty frickin' solid differentiation story before you start down this path...even then, good luck...
Thanks Jim! I gotta say, out of all the ideas I've posted so far, this one is probably my favorite. If anyone does want to pick this up, shoot me a mail at kleneway@hotmail.com and I can offer some additional thoughts and features that I didn't have time to detail out in the post (free of charge + no strings attached, as always).
I think university students would also like an easy way to make documents that follow the guidelines of various journals.
For example, when I need to follow APA style, I use the LaTeX "apa.cls" document class. However, I think the average psych student manually formats their documents in Word.
I think the problem with existing web-based Office substitutes isn't a problem of segmenting the market -- the problem is that they're just not as good as Office. In particular, they're slower, uglier and always seem to be missing some of everyone's favourite features. Office isn't perfect, but it's almost always fast, and it has a lot of features.
Get the implementation right, and you've got a great Office competitor. But given the limitations on the speed of a web-based application I'm not convinced it's possible (but keen to be proven wrong!)
College kids have DC++, Demonoid, ThePiratebay, and very little sense of ethics.
Not gonna work.
In fact, I feel as if this will never really take off for the simple reason that people don't want to have to be connected just to edit their word documents. They want to do that anywhere, connection or not, and as such office apps wont be ported to the internet on a wide scale unless they have something else to offer.
They could just add in Gears support with some sort of merging rules for when the changes are posted back online.
Also, I believe that this idea has a lot to offer. The added value to the college student is the easy collaboration and especially social networking. I could see freshmen students using this because it both helps with their schoolwork and also connects them with other students for homework and projects.
Startup ideas are just the beginning of my plot. These ideas are really just my way of getting some attention prior to the release of my new site: ClubbingBabySeals.com. Once that IPOs, I should have enough money to buy a really, really, really big laser that I can use to etch the Windows logo into the moon.
"Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven’t taken the world by storm, and how you’re going to beat that."
The author needs to deal with this head-on.
To some extent he addresses it implicitly by talking about gaining traction the same way Facebook did. This implies that the author thinks that existing web Office tools haven't gained traction because they're too diffusely targeted. The author seems to think that if a web Office tool had a clustered communities of users, this would somehow drive adoption of a web Office replacement. This is an interesting idea, but I think it's inadequately motivated in the writeup. Do college students comprise the right population for these sorts of clusters? I don't think so. I think college students collaborate too infrequently for them to bother adopting such a tool, especially on projects requiring Office-like functionality. If they need to collaborate in this way (once or twice in their career?) they'll just email each other Office documents, or maybe use Google Docs.