I read an article in Business Week, which discussed the Microsoft announcement of MS Live “We’re going toe-to-toe with Google”. Mentioning that Google was probably going to come out with hosted office software (word processor etc.) it referred to a web site, writely.com, that already offered a hosted word processing service. So I went there.

To be more precise, while sitting in the Analyst area at CA World last week, I teamed up with Gary Barnett (Director de investigación de Ovum and l’escargo fou) and we tried it out. Not only can you create documents with images and web links etc., you can also actively collaborate on a document. So we traded insults over the web and demonstrated to ourselves that this is actually a compelling service. So compelling indeed that I now use this web site to write my blog and to collaborate with Judith Hurwitz.

It is only in Beta and it’s not a perfect service but it’s good enough for most word processing needs. It even has a spellchecker. What it does well is share documents and it is easy enough to use. Go try it and if you have problems using it, click on help. (Microsoft take note—this is what is meant by “ease of use”; it’s about being easy to use). Someone has done an excellent job here—so excellent that I would not be surprised if Writely.com gets to be very popular. It’s not just the word processing, it’s the collaboration.

This is going to take off, whether Google does something similar or not.

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