Manthan

Om is reporting on a rumor about Google and Writely in talks for a possible acquisition. My first reaction is this doesn’t feel like a very sound idea and might fizzle out.

1. I have doubts about AJAX scaling up for complex spreadsheets or other office applications.
2. Secondly Google has tie up with Sun for open office, it should be pushing for xforms , not a AJAX based office suite. Open Document format can natively support xForms.
3. Mozilla is working on Xforms extension (they released 0.4 build recently) and I used it for a few complex forms. RIA can be built better using this than AJAX alone.

In case Google is acquiring writely, then I see it more like a technology acquisitions rather than an application that can be shipped anytime soon. And if they are looking at providing office applications online, then why leave out spreadsheets? Are they acquiring numsum too? And can I cut data from Numsum and paste it in tabular format in Writely? Ray Ozzie was talking clipboard’s yesterday.

Besides handling browser crashes, network failures, offline editing capabilities are critical. So in case they are going to provide an online editor, its critical to provide offline too. This is where open office is needed. You can edit offline and sync online etc, since underlying data is all XML.
I am sorry but writely, numsum etc are technology demonstration projects, and they are not usable applications yet!! Look how long it’s taking Google to get a calendar out of the door? Complex applications like office will take far more effort. We might be looking at years here.

Update: Om’s speculation was right, from the Google official Blog.

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