I like Writely a lot. But it’s hardly going to replace my Office software. What you really need is an application that is truly compatible with MS Office inside and out. OpenOffice and other alternatives just don’t cut it.

Google’s purchase of Writely is the beginning of the end for Microsoft Office, if you believe some people. That probably only means chest-beating blather is back, with the software-as-a-service revolutionaries replacing the egomaniacal dot-com pushers of 1998, but it’s a very interesting deal nonetheless.

I first heard of Writely in November last year when Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff named the product in a dig at Microsoft’s Office Live. ” Companies like Writely, Num Sum, Zimbra, and Goffice are breaking Microsoft’s hypnotic trance,” he wrote in a “memo to staff” that, as so frequently happens, ended up in the media.

vnunet