01.31.07
ZoHo Notebook = End of MS Office?
Yes, the title is sensationalistic. But when the product is as sensational as ZoHo’s notebook (to be released for public consumption in March) it could very well be true. From Social Media Today:
In a nutshell, Zoho Notebook is a place where you can aggregate any kind of content, share it with your colleagues and friends, and publish it onto the Web. You can create as many books as you want, and add any number of pages to any book. On a page, you can add some text, images, audio or video recordings, HTML code, links to external resources, RSS feeds, files, spreadsheets, documents developed with Zoho Writer, tasks, planners, contacts, calendars, anything&
But what makes Zoho Notebook truly remarkable is the ability to get access control and versioning at the object level, rather than just at the page or book level. What this means is that when you add an object to a page—say a piece of text, you can share it with whoever you want, either with read/write access or read only, while not sharing any other object on the page. And when modifications are made to this piece of text, a new version is created, independently of any modification that could have been made to the rest of the page. To be fair, this feature can also be found with some sophisticated Content Management Systems (CMS), but never has it been implemented with such an easy to user interface, which also happens to be totally free to use.
Having worked for a document control company for several years I understand just how important those versioning features are in a corporate environment; now that I have a Subversion server set up at home much of my writing gets tossed straight over. But combining all major office tasks with hosted backup, universal access, and automatic versioning is hot. Google can’t be far behind (although Google only supports spreadsheets and written documents – ZoHo has a few extra apps like ZoHo show, a Powerpoint replacement).
This will significantly affect MS Office sales in 2008. I also think its about time to uninstall Open Office.