Is AjaxWrite the New Microsoft Word?
24 Mar 2006 by Mother Superior
Like most of my generation, I have not written a document without the aid of a keyboard for about 10 years. I remember a strange transition period at University in the mid 90′s when I would begin writing essays in freehand and then type them up in the final draft! The moment I realised I could do an essay in half the time by starting on the computer I never looked back!
Since then, Microsoft Word has been the obvious and only choice for me and most others I know. But today, in a more modern kind of cross-platform collaboration to my essay writing of old, I am typing this in AjaxWrite and then pasting it into my blog software!
Google have just bought Writely so we can expect their challenge to Microsoft’s Office products on the horizon, but AjaxWrite has launched this week and the Net is talking about it. Creator Michael Robertson says that for 90% of the world’s population, the need to buy Microsoft Word just vanished. There are those who agree.
It’s fitting that Internet Explorer does not support this new tool, so you need to use Firefox 1.5 or above to get it up and running. Why not have a look and see what you think.
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I don’t think it’s even the new WordPad. “To keep the program lean, we left out some obscure advanced features” – setting up page size, page numbers, images, clipart, accessing the vast majority of fonts on my computer, all that’s missing way before we get on to stuff like mail merges, macros and so on. Just about every OS you’re likely to find yourself using has a competent mini-word processor that’ll far outclass this.
Given that they seem to have based it on Firefox’s Midas text editor, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be too portable to other browsers either. Maybe a glimpse of the future, but looks like we’re still living in the present.
It will take a great deal of luck and ingenuity to knock Microsoft’s established platform. I rather like what Google is doing with Writely. I haven’t got my head around saving my work on another persons hard drive hosted elsewhere, but that is probably just my age. I expect tomorrow’s kids to be embracing this sort of practice and musing at "the old ways" of today.
AjaxWrite is missing some pretty fundamental tools which are necessary if it is going to compete against microsoft_word and other newcomers.
Hosting peoples private and confidential content on shared servers is not something I can see catching on. It sounds like a great tool for a quick letter whilst on holiday in an internet cafe, but would you really want to be saving your secrets to a server managed by another company?