Google finally brought their online text editor, called Writely, into a Google branded page. In fact they combined Writely with Google Spreadsheets and have now renamed the service to Google Docs & Spreadsheets (clever, huh).
There really isn’t anything too impressive with the Google Docs service because no new features have been introduced. It does look much nicer utilizing Google’s “theme” compared to all of the green colors that Writely seemed to use though. Despite the two services being tied together into one location you still can’t do things like embed a spreadsheet into a text document, which is something that Zoho already offers. In my opinion Google is way behind Zoho and they should just whip out the checkbook and buy them like they did with YouTube. 
Zoho definitely didn’t want to be left out of the news this week either because they are also bringing all of their products together into a central location and calling it Zoho Virtual Office. TechCrunch says that the new service is still in closed Beta but it will be launching today as a free service for non-corporate users. For those that haven’t experienced the products that Zoho offers then I think you will find some of them to be quite amazing compared to their competitors like Google.
Here is a screenshot of what the new Virtual Office will look like later today:
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Having looked at both I must agree. Zoho is miles ahead in both, functionality and UI. As for Zoho, its aim apparently is to mimic MS Office(tm) look & feel. Google just can’t afford to copy its archrival, or does it?
I reckon Google could catch up with Zoho fairly easily - but they’re probably more focusing on unifying existing services for the moment. I don’t reckon buying Zoho would happen - YouTube got bought because it was a brand more known by ‘da kidz’ and Google doesn’t fit the ‘cool net’ brand for said people.
Zoho does make it feel like you’re using Microsoft Office which is probably why it will appeal to corporations more than Google Docs would.
True, and I guess it really matters what image Google is trying to make for itself. If you say you want a simple online text editor or spreadsheet manager then I would recommend Google. If someone says that they want the closest thing to Microsoft’s offerings then Zoho is probably the way to go.
google does have one thing that zoho does not - Right to Left support in writely. although it still have tons of problem (it decided to Mirror a huge table i had in a word document, which made it completely useless to me).
but since most of the world doesn’t write in RTL, Zoho will save this option to last i guess. and to me, that is a shame.
i do wish the Computer and Internet world would make up it’s mind when it comes to Unicode and writing direction already. it took us a million years to “convince” microsoft to do something about it, i don’t want to wait another million years to use the rest of the internet like a normal person.