Writely is the seed of a Big Idea

About four months ago I was having coffee with my friend Sam Schillace. I've known him and his friend Steve Newman for about eight years. I first got to know them when they quickly built built the first cross-platform WYSIWYG HTML editor and sold it to Claris (Claris Home Page) for a bundle. I had a small role in greasing it. Since then they did some amazing work for Macromedia and Intuit.

Sam was telling me then about how they were 'playing' with AJAX and were kicking around a few ideas about the next app they might write. (I am their resident 'nay sayer' about ideas.) We went through some SOHO ideas and that didn't seem toocompelling. I had just funded Ojos and kind of had Flickr on the brain, as Frickr was beginning to get some play in the Zeitgeist. Then Sam mentioned "Flickr for Documents". WOW! What an interesting idea... Sam now tells me that it was that afternoon they decided to commit to create Writely.

My focus with Flickr was on the tagging. As I left that morning I began to think, "wait, tagging adds no value with long docs." I sent Sam a message to that effect, saying text search works just fine.

But it became apparent a few weeks later when they had their first alpha (yes, a few weeks, these guys are coding Gods; in 2003 Steve was arguably the best coder in the Bay Area, placing fifth worldwide and first Bay Area-wide in the Google contest) that what Sam and Steve had in mind was 'let's do an AJAX app like Flickr but for documents'. I missed the point -- the point was AJAX, not tags.

I still missed the point on Writely when I tried it. This is because I rarely use Word and I work with a very small group of people at Leapfrog. I read a lot of stuff, but I rarely compose beyond email. Besides, I thought, who needs Word in the cloud?

But Steve and Sam (and their third partner, whom I have not yet met) have hit a vein. No one needs Word in the cloud, but lots of people need something richer than email and more collaborative than Word. These folks have really invented a new category. I am not going to try to name it, just describe it, because the description is the meaning.

Most of us use Word to create a 'document' and what do we do with most of these documents? We share/send them. Why else do we write them but to share them? Sharing means I have to move it from my desktop to yours. Since it was important enough to write, it is important enough to save -- but where and how? And how do you know you have the same version I have three months from now?

Document Management is a lousy business, mainly because it is an add-on to the primary task of authoring. It is a top-down process. 1+1=1.1 when you combine them. Ask anyone who has ever tried to implement a document mangement system. As Esther Dyson once called it, it becomes Nazi-ware. And here's where the tags come in. It is a bottoms-up approach to document management.

This is the beauty of Writely. It is not Word in the Cloud. It is a new application category that sits between network Email and desktop Word processing. Richer than email; more collaborative than word processing. (and a lot more intuitive than a wiki)

So it's nice to create a category, but that's only half the big idea. The other half is that the nature of work has changed. Twenty years ago we created memos and sent them to people in interoffice mail. Twenty years ago we created spreadsheets and gave people printouts. Twenty years ago we used powerpoint to create transparencies for overhead projectors. Microsoft built their Office franchise on the core assumption that people work at their desk[top] but the world has changed.

The AJAX version of Office is coming. But the key isn't AJAX. The key is the apps will naturally collaborate the way we have all learned to work - via the Web. AJAX just makes it nicer. This AJAX Office won't kill Microsoft Office. They are different. But I bet in five years more people use AJAX Office than Microsoft Office.

Sam and Steve are on to something very big. Write[ly] On!

We're having coffee again in the morning. I can't wait....

Comments

[Dorrian]

This definitely has huge potential. 1 other area that I think is ripe for huge and drastic change for similar collaborative reasons is contacts and calendar. Existing companies like Plaxo try to own the client too (or at least install some heavy thick thing over Outlook), which is crazy. Someone needs to come out with a simple & beautiful web based contact and calendar management system, that supports a social network (looking at each other's calendars, updating one's own contact information which automatically updates info in others), but not try to own the client. Let the client be Outlook, iCal, the cell phone, the palm pilot and the host of other software/devices anyone wants to use. If the newco focused on making 2 way syncing dead simple for every device/software (including how you initially inputted your info) and the benefits of the collaborative elements existed, I think word would spread like wildfire (or at least capture, say, that 95% of us who will change our cellphone in the next 18 months). It could be the basis for a company that supports a social network that becomes portable across the web and other communities (IM is in a position to do this - but of course we know the entrenchment and interoperability problems there that remain from AOL's dominance six years ago). It is crazy in my humble opinion that any one website thinks it can contain a social network long term - the Internet is simply too far reaching for that. It also amazes me that Microsoft sits on the largest social network imaginable, but decides to keep that information disconnected among all of the users. Is Vista smart enough to figure this opportunity out? Is anyone out there?

[Peter Rip]

It seems to me that the first guy to incorporate a secure and permissioned RSS / XML feed from contacts and/or calendar is going to attract a lot of users. The basic problem is permissioning the data appropriately. These data *want* to be syndicated (think mail/merge with Writely, for example) but access control is complex.

[Benjamin Yoskovitz]

I came across Writely a few weeks ago and am trying it out on a couple projects.

The idea definitely has merit. To me, the question is always the business model. Will people pay to use the added service?

For the best value, I could see Writely integrated into other applications (intranet, document management, project management, etc.) so that it's not a separate app that people have to log into, access and use individually, but part and parcel of any larger collaborative system they may be using.

[Pete Cashmore]

Peter,

This is a great analysis. I think Writely could really go places - in fact, we're slowly building up a group of apps which could eventually defeat Office. Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com) is great, too - it's an online version of Outlook. And of course Gmail does email+AJAX very well.

I notice you're involved with OJOs, too - I posted about this a while back, and I think it's a great project:

http://mashable.com/2005/09/06/auto-tagging-ojos-and-the-rise-of-the-participatory-panopticon/

***Everyone else: Kiko (http://www.kiko.com)is a new web-based calendar. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I do plan to.

[Lee Kraus]

I have been using Writely for a week and love it. I have been developing a proposal and a research paper and have shared with my colleage. I think this will be huge.

[Peter Rip]

Benjamin:

I think there *is* a business model and, in fact, that's what Sam and I discussed that morning.

I think the key to the business model is to realize that, like lots of Web-incarnations of legacy businesses, it is much lower per user, but much more efficient than the legacy business. Thus, the real metric to look at isn't scale, it's ROE. The Web obsoletes legacy distribution channels, making lower revenue-per-user a very good business, if the scale is there.

I know what I have said is fairly obvious. But the specific application of the principle to Writely's business is still an on-going experiment.

Maybe Lee or Pete would care to comment on what it's worth to them??

[Dorrian]

First let me apologize for my long distracting comment but thankfully the smart folks brought us back to Writely (I should really figure out trackbacks for side conversations). I agree on lower distribution/lower price per user but I would worry about how intense competition will get precisely because distribution is so easy. So, unlike Word, who had massive power because of its distribution (standardization was a factor too of course), the long-term pressure here will be open standards for documents and switching costs for an application like will be lowered as a result. I would think seriously about some distribution strategy to achieve scale quickly beyond free/viral. Alternatively, go pick discrete markets where collaboration is a painful necessity and writely could become a standard/establish high switching costs by creating specific industry functionality (I think of law, finance/investment community, international trade). Too long again...

[Abhay Kumar]

I've been looking for a collaborative editor since I discovered SubEthaEdit for Mac OSX. I felt so painfully left out as I'm a Linux / Windows user and MoonEdit and some others just couldn't cut it. With the popularity of AJAX applications, it was only due time that such a tool like Writely was implemented. Kudos go the team for that.

I think the tool would be valuable for an organization that can't necessarily use a wiki because of various reasons (a novice who knows how to use a word processor but does not know how to use tags). This is just one small aspect of why it would be useful.

[Peter Rip]

These are the inevitable questions - is Writely an app or a platform? Abhay's comment is very much on the app side. Dorian is wrestling with whether, as an app, Writely should become more task-specific.

I think the answer lies in how rapidly and widely Writely is adopted, and what kind of API, if any , is published.

[Benjamin Yoskovitz]

I'm glad I came back to check this discussion out, I didn't realize people had/would respond to my questions/comments re: business model.

Writely will definitely need to test out a few models. I agree that the per user cost can be low, but getting people to adopt it on a wide scale may be tricky (beyond the blogosphere of people that jump on anything Web 2.0 presently, or any "Microsoft-replacement" opportunities).

I still see a means of integration between Writely and a host of other applications. I would probably look at these opportunities alongside the low cost per user model. Make Writely a value add with other applications. I don't know if Writely can stand alone as a platform from which others build upon, doing it in the reverse (where Writely integrates with other platforms) might work to generate more revenue, more quickly (of course, that might not be the goal here anyway).

[Joerg Bienert]

Writely, Zimbra, Kiko and many other approaches show us, what is possible using technologies like AJAX. Asking yourself about how to integrate different web-apps, you will start thinking about a kind of web operating system, as we did in our scenario of empulseos

http://www.empulse.de/archives/2005/11/web_operating_s_1.html