A recent New York Time article describes Google’s latest broadside on Microsoft.
Writely is a very simple and slick online application that is a blending of Word, a document management system and an intranet. Multiple writers can collaborate on a single document and then post it to blogs, websites or store for future use. Much like 37Signal‘s applications, its attractiveness is in its simplicity and ease of use. It also further demonstrates that the future of applications (licensed and hosted) is around collaborative functionality. With broadband penetration growing and connection reliability greatly improved, hosted, collaborative applications will continue to take share from silo’d, traditional applications. Further developments in wireless like high speed EVDO services, will further drive
this. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft’s (and others) response will be as their strength has come from their control of the desktop, not the web.