EarlyStageVC

Writely - The Back Story

Sam, Steve, and Claudia have done it.  Writely is now part of Google.  Here’s the back story to this ‘overnight success’ that every Web 2.0 developer should know.   Overnight success is part of the Myth of Silicon Valley. This overnight success is twenty years in the making. And I think it means the business-as-feature GYM shopping spree is going to slow down from here.

Back in July when Sam and I were having coffee, he asked my opinion about a bunch of ideas he, Steve, and Claudia had been working on.  One was “Flickr for Documents”.  That afternoon they began to focus on what became Writely.  So you could (erroneously) conclude that this was another Web 2.0 one hit wonder with a nice UI  and LAMP after a few months.

I’ve known Sam and Steve for about nine years.  They have been in the application software business for nearly 20 years.  Two important themes arise from this.  First, they aren’t generic applications software guys.  Every major product they have shipped has been about “documents” but on successive platforms. 

1. They were the authors of FullPaint and FullWrite  -- the largest selling third party word processing and painting apps on the original Macs.
2. They developed the first cross-platform (Mac, Windows) WYSYG HTML editor which came to market as Claris Home Page.
3. They developed the re-design and built the underlying platform to Macromedia’s re-write of DreamWeaver.
4. Now they have built Writely.

I’ve seen them build two major sources of expertise in this concentration.  First, they understand the user problem so deeply that they can blend the advantages of each new platform with ‘document authoring problem’ to really build a platform-native solution, not a clone of someone else’s work.    Second, before tackling the development of the application, they develop a library of services and tools that they know will be required to bang out the kinds of features and performance an authoring application requires. 

The first advantage is their intuitive “MRD”.  The second is their secret sauce for rapid application development.   Both benefit from having been repeated over multiple computing platforms. So what appears to be 7-8 months of effort is really built on years of experience expressed in a continuously evolving code base.   

Personally, I think purchase by Google this is the market “top” for Web 2.0 feature acquisitions. The bar is raising for Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Few Web 2.0 companies have this sort of prior art.  Put another way, most Web 2.0 companies really are six months of engineering on a LAMP stack.  From what I know of Sam and Steve’s ability to time the market’s hunger for product acquisitions.  I’ve learned they are the Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger of software.

AJAX Office is Everywhere!

Wow. In the past three days I have bumped into an alpha or beta Web-incarnation for every Microsoft desktop product - several have multiple startups attacking the $11B on the desktop. Just got off the phone with yet another one. Most are AJAX, some are Flash- or Flex-based.

The simple conclusion is that 'free' web-based versions will kill desktop versions. Nope. Outlook wasn't killed by free web-based mail. Don't get me wrong. I think the Office Suite is dead meat. But not because web clones will kill them.

The real problem with desktop apps is no one works at their desktop anymore. I remember the Office of the Future initiative at XEROX PARC 25 years ago. (Almost took a summer research job there then. But went to Oroweat instead, to make money). PARC's vision was the paperless office. But what really has happened is the Desktopless Office. I wish I could trademark the term Net Work because that's what people do now -- the Net is integral to nearly every dimension of individuals' Work.

Twenty years ago I had desks with files and drawers. Now my desk is merely a pedestal for my computer. My computer's "desktop" is really a pedestal for my browser -- something to place my browser on so I can use it.

Microsoft's product suite (and, more importantly, it's revenue model) is tied to selling software for users to make their virtual desktops "more productive." But the productivity bottleneck is not longer me or you, it is the connection between us. That's why we are on the Net so much; send email so much; talk on the phone so much. And that's why a better, new, cool UI on Word, Excel, Visio, Outlook, Powerpoint, Access, etc. doesn't matter much. (I am still using Office 2000 on my PC and Office 2003 on my Macs; but I have the latest versions of 3 browsers on each one). There may be an upgrade cycle for Office which will boost short term earnings, but there is a much bigger migration cycle as people do Net Work instead of Desktop Work. And the smartest developers of the AJAX Office are capitalizing on this.

Some things to watch:
Writely
Bindows
Gliffy
Numsum
Meebo
Zimbra Evan Wilner corrected me about Zimbra "The new OpenSource e-mail system Zimbra is no more a "web-based" application than Microsoft Exchange...It certainly is true that Zimbra has an AJAX web client---but Exchange also supports web based client access."

and these are just the ones I can talk about....

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....