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Lately there’s been an increasing buzz about Web Office, something which We have been reading about for some time now. Red Herring magazine wrote an article with the provocative headline 17 MS Office Killers. While it would be quite a story if Microsoft did get usurped by a Web-based Office, the reality is that Microsoft will - over time - move their Office suite online. Or at the least end up with a hybrid desktop/Web suite.

There are however viable alternatives to Microsoft Office springing up. Red Herring identified ThinkFree, Zoho and gOffice (not affiliated with Google) as 3 likely candidates to create a Web Office suite. Personally I think you can add Zimbra, JotSpot, Goowy and Google itself to that list - even though each of them has work to do yet to get to a full suite. However, being in love with Google, I will feel it is on the way and it is almost there.  

You can’t go past the Mountain View upstarts as the most likely to challenge Microsoft. Already they have Writely, a spreadsheet, Calendar, email and a few other Suite products under their wing. There are signs that Google is bringing it all together - the latest being the release of Google Apps for Your Domain (another poorly named Google product!). This offers private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to small businesses.

Zoho is certainly building up its suite of products quite nicely. Recently it released Zoho Projects, an online project management tool. But rather than being directly competitive with Microsoft, if anything Zoho Project is taking aim at 37Signals. When I head a article posted here Web Office Suite: best of breed products in February, I identified Basecamp as the best-of-breed online project management tool. I said at the time that Basecamp "continues to set the pace. It features message boards, to-do lists, simple scheduling, collaborative writing, and file sharing."

Marshall at TechCrunch did a good review of Zoho Projects and this quote sums up the main differentiator: "The Zoho team told me that if Basecamp targets “the less is more crowd,” ZohoProjects will be feature rich."

Zoho will also soon release a single sign-on feature, so that the full range of Zoho products can be used more like a Web Office suite. Currently they’re separate, although Zoho does have a product called Zoho Virtual Office, which is described as "groupware" and has things like email, IM and calendar.

See also my coverage of ZohoShow and ZohoWriter. I certainly think Zoho has all the pieces now, so it’s just a matter of hooking them all together and continuing to improve each product offering.

ThinkFree is a Korean company which has also an impressive web-based Suite of products. ThinkFree bills itself as the "World’s Best Web Based Office Suite". When read a interview of ThinkFree CEO TJ Kang in early May, he compared ThinkFree favorably with Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice (a desktop product). TJ Kang has told that they were more compatible with MS Office than OpenOffice - "especially with the spreadsheet and presentation". In summary, I think ThinkFree is a solid Web Office suite offering - and like Zoho will continue to improve in functionality over time.

Recently read about Zimbra. Currently they have a mini-suite of Web Office products. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite has email, contacts, group calendaring, word processing and spreadsheets. The latter two were added recently, as part of launch of Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.0. So Zimbra is continuing to bulk up their Web Office Suite credentials.

I am impressed that Zimbra is packed full of features. They have mashups and things like "Search Builder" and an RSS reader.

Summary

There is much more to explore on this topic, and more companies to mention, so over time I’ll be investigating Web Office further on R/WW. For now it seems like Google is the one to watch, plus the reactions of Microsoft to that threat. But don’t discount the small players, like Zoho and ThinkFree. There is a lot of innovation happening in this space, so it’s not all about the big companies battling it out for dominance.

For such sharp rivals, the contests between Google and Microsoft have been laughably lopsided. Even as they jostle for users and software developers, Google has run away with the search traffic market while Microsoft has kept a lock on desktop software–like they’re hardly even playing the same game. That’s about to change, as Google readies a long-rumored push to assemble its E-mail, word processing, and spreadsheet apps into a Web-based suite that sounds more like Microsoft Office with each addition.

Google this week will launch Google Apps for Your Domain, a software bundle aimed at small and midsize companies. The free, ad-supported package combines Google’s E-mail, calendar, and instant messaging with Web site creation software. It will be hosted in Google’s data center, branded with customers’ domain names, and packaged with management tools for IT pros.

That’s the first step. Later this year, Google plans to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheets to the suite, build online collaboration features that work across its applications, and market the whole package to large companies for a fee. Google will include IT-friendly features such as APIs, directory-server integration, guaranteed performance levels, and telephone tech support.