Google Does Word Processing

Posted by Harry McCracken
Friday, March 10, 2006, 09:04 AM (PST)

For eons, there have been rumors a possibly browser-based Google office suite. Now there's an intriguing nugget of reality to ponder: Google has bought Writely, the impressive free browser-based collaborative word processor.

What Google is going to do with Writely isn't entirely clear--it says there are no plans to embed advertising in the service--but it's yet another recent example (along with Google Base, the new Google Desktop, and Google Page Creator) of Google doing something involving being a repository for information, not just an indexer of it. (They've always said that their mission was to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"--maybe it's time to add "and store it, too" to that statement.)

I don't know if Google has specific intentions for Writely, but the acquisition makes perfect sense in a big-picture way. Writely already follows Google-esque principles better than some of Google's own offerings: It's innovative, easy, useful, fun, and free. If it becomes a springboard for other broswer-based productivity tools from Google, that might be a very good thing. And if Google had tried to develop its own word processor from scratch, I can't imagine it would have been any better...or much different.

One other note. In the short term, the Google-Writely deal has one major downside: Writely has stopped signing up new users while it moves the service to Google's platform. (No word on when it might open up again.)

If you're already a Writely user, you can still get in, but you have a cap on the number of people you can invite in to work on a document. Collaboration is one of the primary notions behind Writely, so that may be an issue for some Writely fans.

Lesson: As great as great free stuff (like Writely) is, you've got to be careful about coming to depend on it. Freeloaders can't be choosers--or at least it's harder for them to be quite as demanding as paying customers. (Oddly enough, I just finished writing an Up Front column for the next issue of PC World which touched on this issue.)

If you're intrigued by Writely and bummed you can't get in, check out ZohoWriter, a similar, similarly nifty free service that's still signing up new users.