New players in Office20 space

By Vivek | February 12th, 2007 at 11:00 pm ET         

Couple of exciting startups in the Office20 space are shaping up. First is Slideaware which would be launching the beta of its presentation platform. From what I heard, it should function as a storage and management platform for presentations created using Microsoft Powerpoint.

Second is Waltham, MA based Virtual Ubiquity, which is quietly building its web-based word processor to take on Google/Writely and off course Microsoft Word. Virtual Ubiquity claims to be externally funded and looking to launch sometime this year. These guys should be really serious about their marketing and monetization plans to justify the funding, or might end up being another easy prey for Google or Microsoft. On the other hand, Virtual Ubiquity can force Google to aggressively push forward its development efforts for GOffice, which has not seen the kind of innovation we had expected. To start with GOffice site really drags these days, offline mode is in works for forever, spell/grammar check sucks, and there is no news about GDocs API.