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 Think Pragmatic (Business2.0/David Orenstein) |
July 11, 2000 |
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| ThinkFree's quest to innovate Web-based office software starts with a nod to reality: It's Microsoft's domain. |
July 11, 2000 issue
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David Orenstein
Rather than exploding onto the scene like a Supernova, Sun Microsystems' StarPortal, a free Web-based suite of office word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software has been lost in space.
The suite will finally debut at the end of this summer, says Tony Hampel, Sun's marketing director for Webtops and applications. The product's delay stems from an extra round of testing designed to make StarPortal "better than a traditional 1.0 release," he says. (See "Sun's Shooting Star ," Feb. '00, p50.) But since StarPortal was announced in September, observers have questioned why Sun, always a high-end Unix company, is bothering to muck around in the office applications market.
They commonly attribute the move to Scott McNealy's limitless zeal to battle Microsoft, which is the dominant office software leader. |
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ThinkFree's Ken Rhie marches to the beat of a different drummer - one who brings the mobility of the Web to the office software market.
Jenny Thomas |
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If Sun makes any real headway against Microsoft Office, it will be the first to have done so unless Ken Rhie and his ThinkFree office suite get there first. Rhie is taking a less zealous, more pragmatic approach to the office software market and might just carve out a decent niche by joining Microsoft rather than beating it.
No illusions
Like StarPortal, ThinkFree is a free, Web-based office suite that works for users operating Mac or PC systems. For now, the company has no illusions that it can wean people off of Microsoft Office simply by offering its product for free. ThinkFree Office is therefore a pragmatic mix of technologies: It employs Sun's Java language to exploit the Web and run on multiple platforms, but it also sticks as close to the Microsoft Office user interface and file formats as a 9.5MB application can.
ThinkFree labored to make its software mimic the familiar Windows-based look and feel of Microsoft Office, and it is fully Office compatible. "We don't believe in retraining the whole population," Rhie says of ThinkFree's approach. |
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