Hasta La Gadget!

May 14

Google And Zoho Each Create “Office Suite”

Posted in: Google, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on October 11, 2006 by CyberNet.

Google Docs

Google finally brought their online text editor, called Writely, into a Google branded page. In fact they combined Writely with Google Spreadsheets and have now renamed the service to Google Docs & Spreadsheets (clever, huh).

There really isn’t anything too impressive with the Google Docs service because no new features have been introduced. It does look much nicer utilizing Google’s “theme” compared to all of the green colors that Writely seemed to use though. Despite the two services being tied together into one location you still can’t do things like embed a spreadsheet into a text document, which is something that Zoho already offers. In my opinion Google is way behind Zoho and they should just whip out the checkbook and buy them like they did with YouTube.

Zoho definitely didn’t want to be left out of the news this week either because they are also bringing all of their products together into a central location and calling it Zoho Virtual Office. TechCrunch says that the new service is still in closed Beta but it will be launching today as a free service for non-corporate users. For those that haven’t experienced the products that Zoho offers then I think you will find some of them to be quite amazing compared to their competitors like Google.

Here is a screenshot of what the new Virtual Office will look like later today:

Zoho Virtual Office