A Tangible Reason Microsoft Needs Yahoo

Feb. 12, 2008 5:08 AM ETMSFT, AABA1 Comment

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Want a glimpse of Microsoft's future without some radical shift like buying Yahoo? Take a look at this piece entitled "Forget Word: Thirteen Online Word Processors." Excerpts follow:

We’ve already told you to start doing your spreadsheets online, and now it’s time to let you know how to get your documents done the same way. We’ve lined up a mixture of 13 paid and free word processing alternatives for you to give a try, and hopefully find one that meets your needs.

AjaxWrite - AjaxWrite is designed to look somewhat like Word so you have a familiar interface, and it can also read and write to Microsoft formatted documents. It does have a drawback in that it only works in Firefox browsers above version 1.5, but they make up for it by being completely free.

Buzzword - Powered by Adobe AIR, this word processor is extremely slick in its interface, and highly responsive to your clicks.

FlySuite.com - Allows you to work both online and off, and offers you 1 GB of online storage for your files.

Google Documents - It would be impossible to do any list of online word processors without mentioning Google Docs. Easy to use, easy to collaborate, it’s just plain easy...

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This article was written by

Kevin Maney

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For the past 22 years, Kevin Maney has been a reporter, columnist, and editor at USA Today. For 16 of those years, Maney wrote America's most widely read column about the technology industry. In 2005 he launched a blog on USAToday.com, beginning his journey into online journalism. Maney is the author of the critically acclaimed The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and the Making of I.B.M., published in 2003 by John Wiley & Sons and later made into a BBC special. He also wrote the 1995 BusinessWeek bestseller Megamedia Shakeout: The Inside Story of the Leaders and the Losers in the Exploding Communications Industry. Maney has a B.A. in English and journalism from Rutgers University.

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Comments (1)

Tom B

12 Feb. 2008

Comments (3.62K)

This will become a real thorn in the side of MSFT over time; MSFT has zero cred on anything related to security, so few businesses would be willing to use MS-owned on-line apps. on the WWW.

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