Zoho - Cheating On Writely With Another Web-Based Processor

Today I’m composing in Zoho , another online word processor - cheating on Writely , as it were. I’m fairly satisfied with Google’s newest acquisition, but figured it was only fair to check out some of the competition.

These online applications are going to be coming out of the woodwork like little bugs with sombreros for the next few months or years, until the market settles down. Everyone is going to try to improve on everyone else, a la the word processor/office suite wars of the late Nineties. I can’t begin to remember how many attempts to blow MS Office out of the water I witnessed and tested back then. Some of them were pretty good, but none of them - even the excellent SunOffice and its clone, OpenOffice - had the juice to knock Redmond out of the catbird seat.

That was then. WWW2 may supply the venue, and applications like Zoho and Writely may be the competition. I’ve written about that before, so I’m not going to harp, but this is the first chance since Windows 95 hit the shelves that any applications have had a serious shot at Micro$oft’s dominance in this area. I’ve looked at MS’s online offerings, and I’m not impressed much. They’re more of the same stilted, formal, very Microsoft stuff, overcomplicated and clearly trying to do new things with old ideas, instead of innovating. (Well, I guess that’s redundant - it is Microsoft.) It’s the guys who aren’t afraid to try new stuff who are going to dominate in a Web-based market.

Back to Zoho. The interface is what grabs first. It looks familiar, with 3-D buttons that have the right symbols on them. Unlike Writely, there are buttons for most of the common features. Writely depends a lot on drop-down menus for things like table insertion, super- and subscript, etc., and that increases the learning curve quite a bit. I’ve created at least three dozen documents in Writely since it first became available in beta, and I still have to hunt for some things, like page breaks, that I don’t use often.

Zoho is quite intuitive. I like the desktop a lot. I also like the sidebar, where different categories and tags reside. Writely’s desktop uses the entire width of the screen, which makes it hard to read what you’ve written if you’re not used to working in full page view. The sidebar is handy, and narrows Zoho’s work area to about what we’re used to with Word and the other “standard” word processors.

The appearance is pleasant, and can be changed by “skins” that are really only color changes. As it happens, I like the native pale blue the best, but it’s a nice touch. One of the places where Writely falls flat on its face is lack of pizzazz. It’s so plain Jane it reminds me of a tan 1955 Chevy. Just blah. That won’t last for long now that Google has them, but at the moment the 2-D buttons and drab colors just suck. Another place Writely fails is tabs, or rather lack of tabs. It has the habit of opening new Firefox tabs - half of them empty - at the drop of one of those insects’ hats. (I presume that it would open windows in Internet Explorer, which I never use.) Not only are they empty tabs annoying, they use up memory - not to mention tab bar real estate. Zoho, on the other hand, has civilized tabs where they belong, in the application itself.

Apart from the above, the two seem comparable as word processors go. You can post to your blog, share, make documents public or private, etc. Zoho saves in .pdf, .doc, .swx (OpenOffice) and .txt formats. They promise me they’re thinking about .rtf as well, which will make it comparable to Writely in that department, too.

Writely loads a bit faster, and Zoho reacts faster. I suspect that more of the application resides in memory during use. Zoho loads at about the same speed over my 6 MB DSL connection as over dialup, so it may be that their servers are loaded out. It has a lot of nice little touches - a word count every time you save, for example. Writely, however, has Google - masters of Ajax - working on it, so I wouldn’t expect any major differences to last.

The biggest difference, at the moment, is that Zoho has an online “office suite” of sorts already available. While the word processor permits sharing, the office application permits full-fledged collaboration (also available in Writely), plus planning and reminders, calendar, spreadsheet, and several other online solutions to business matters. I haven’t fooled with them because, frankly, I couldn’t be less interested, beyond a certain general informational level. I don’t use such things myself, and wouldn’t even know how to evaluate them. Beyond that, the fact that Zoho has them now - some still in beta - isn’t all that exciting, given that we know Google will be bringing similar projects to fruition in the near future.

Offhand, I’d say that Writely needs to take a good look at Zoho and copy its desktop rather carefully. As far as functionality and future prospects are concerned, anyone who bets against a Google operation is - in my opinion - almost certainly backing the wrong horse. I’ll continue to use Zoho for the time being, though. I like its style, and no one from the Googleplex has ever emailed me in the middle of the night - or any other time, for that matter - the way the guy from Zoho did about the .rtf. I wish it well; the Big G can stand the competition.

[tags]ajax,zoho,writely,google web-based word processor,www2[/tags]