The Lindows Guy Goes After Office
April 14, 2006 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
Michael Robertson, the man responsible for the Lindows operating system has now set his sights on another market, Microsoft’s Office software.
He’s not hiding any of his reasons, he’s doing it because that’s where the money is, but I don’t think he’ll be making any money directly from his products, the most popular of which (and the only one available right now) is ajaxWrite.
At the same time, he’s taking a different approach than Microsoft. Unlike Microsoft products such as Word and Excel, the programs from Robertson’s company will be free. They will be accessed online, from inside a Web browser, rather than the traditional method of storing them entirely on a PC hard drive.
I realize the big push and exciting new stuff is all about Web 2.0 and I think there’s definitely some interesting stuff going on in the arena. However, I just don’t think I’d ever consider an online word processing as a viable contender to replace a PC/harddrive based platform. Broadband is continually expanding into an always-on-everywhere connection, but I’m just not sure about everything online only is really going to work.
I could see a very lean and sleek application that’s capable of taking care of documents offline and continually synching to store and share the latest version online. Which is where I think some of the potential strength in Office Live.
Source: Software Notebook: Microsoft rival turns sights toward Office
Hey Jason,
Actually, MR is releasing a new Ajax application each Wednesday (at noon?) until…well…he’s out of them. Not only has he launched Alax Write, he’s also launched Ajax Sketch and Ajaxk XLS.
Oh, and after the near lawsuite, Lindows is now called Linspire :)
Ajax Sketch: http://ajaxsketch.com/
AjaxXLS:http://ajaxxls.com/
I think AjaxXLS is just an Excel viewer for the first release but plans are for it to be a full spreadsheet dealie like Ajax Write is.
I’m interviewing him next week for my podcast. The plan is just to talk about the Gizmo Project, but he’s so hard to get hold of that once I have him on the line I’ll probably get him to talk about the Ajax stuff too.