Comments on: New Microsoft Office competition from Zoho, Zooos

Installed software is becoming so old-fashioned....At the Office 2.0 conference, two online productivity suites are showing off their work values.

[camdef]

Calm down, Rafe. These are nowhere near MS Office in anything.

[TyeMeister]

Not much for MS to worry about with any online web apps. If a business needs to rely on connectivity to run their essential productivity apps, does the business world come to screaming halt when their networks are down? At least if I can't access my documents when our network is down, I can still use the applications to be productive.

[skillingssucks]

Ever hear of offline access?

[creppie]

The future may be hybrid local/hosted apps. Downtime is not acceptable and once in a while we need the advanced features of local apps.

[anandvvn]

I used zoho a few times and its very descent interface and has nice descent features of standard word processing application. One thing that I like about MS Word is the macro programming capabilities and user forms. I am not sure if this can be applied to a online application, of course there will be the security issues too with macros. I suppose Zoho write will take few more improvements and features. As of now if you don't have word installed you can write documents in here and print or save it or export it. Personally I would use both which ever is available to me. I have used zoho write on broadband connection, so I find it loading quite fast enough. So far it looks good enough, but it would take a bit more time to compete with Word, word is been around long time and is quite popular. I hope both compete and give us better product to use.

[rapier1]

So I took an 8 page paper I wrote in Word for a conference earlier this year and up loaded it to Zoho. It had some embedded images, a few tables, and some relatively minor formatting (two columns (a requirement for publication)). The result was pretty much a disaster. The two column formatting was entirely lost, one of the tables failed to display, I lost all but one of the embedded images, and not a single footnote was preserved. While these sort of features aren't used by people dashing off a quick letter they are frequently used in business and educational settings. When you include the fact that you don't have revision management or a slew of other features I simply can't recommend Zoho for more that the most casual user. To be fair I had similar problems with Google Docs. They're good solutions for casual users but they will not, at this time, replace dedicated word processors for people that need more than basic functionality.