Online office products–is this the future of all software? Well, I would be very surprised, but I am happy to see that there are reasonably robust products available free for individuals or very small businesses, and sharing documents over the web solves some problems. For example, my personal computers at home were old, with old operting systems. To upgrade the OS would have required considerable expense since I would also have had to upgrade some of the software. Then I got a new laptop for Christmas, loaded with Microsoft Vista, and quickly discovered that my flashdrive was not compatible with Vista. My email was always overloaded with attachments. I started using Google docs to work on files at home and at work. No more carrying files on my flashdrive, no more emailing attachments to myself. However, the first time I tried to share a document I quickly learned that the collaboraters had to have Google accounts also. I am glad I didn’t try to use Microsoft (as if!) because they are predictably even more restrictive and don’t share smoothly with people using non-MS browsers, etc. ZOHO looks even better than Google, but Google probably isn’t going anywhere and I would hate to have a company with my documents disappear suddenly.
Tags: Google docs, office products
May 4, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Brenda, thanks for trying out Zoho. I want to point out that Zoho is the online division of the software company AdventNet, which has been around 12 years, profitably serving customers. While we are small compared to Google, we are going to be around too
and our products speak for our capability to innovate.
Thank you.
Sridhar Vembu
Zoho