By Michael Vizard

AS A COMPANY dedicated to providing as a Web service a set of productivity applications that are compatible with the file format used in Microsoft Office, ThinkFree.com has taken on one of the most ambitious software efforts in recent memory. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, company president Ken Rhie explains why he thinks his start-up company can succeed where other companies such as Lotus, Corel, and Borland have previously failed.

InfoWorld: What is it exactly that Thinkfree.com does that's uniquely different from companies that have tried to compete with Microsoft in this space before?

Rhie: At the 50,000-feet level, we're a killer app for the new paradigm that supports anywhere, anytime, any platform computing. From a technical perspective, we provide a 100 percent pure Java office suite that works on any computer platform that's accessible via an Internet connection. But we don't require the connection to be there at all times, because it works offline also. That means it looks like the old familiar application and it reads and writes all the familiar application formats, so there is very little pain of migrating to the new paradigm. But once you go there, there's a whole open set of new requirements that we meet that the old Windows applications could not meet.

InfoWorld: Such as what?

Rhie: I don't think people will be required to lug along a laptop unless they want to, and there are times when you really want to carry it. But we want to make computing and information and the associated collaboration ubiquitous, which is the root of the next paradigm shift.

InfoWorld: Does that mean you'll extend your software down to the PDA [personal digital assistant] level?

Rhie: We will do that. Today, we only focus on the actual computers, whether it's a laptop or a desktop. But we have built our service in such a way that we could extend to the bigger appliance market.

InfoWorld: What exactly does being Microsoft Office-compatible mean?

Rhie: First of all, we want to leverage the training and investments made by corporations and individuals, so our suite looks very similar to it. Secondly, functions and features are very, very much like Microsoft Office. Again, we want to make sure all your favorite features are still available. And finally, you can read and write directly to Microsoft file formats, so it's a transparent migration.

InfoWorld: But what happens if Microsoft decides to change the file format in a future release of Office?

Rhie: We can actually move faster [in making changes] than Microsoft can change their format. Microsoft, for their own sake, cannot move very fast because once they change the file format, they're going to get IT managers asking, 'Why did they mess around with a file format which they've been working on for 10 years?' So they can't really change their own format very rapidly. If they do, they'll put it into beta format for a year or two. That gives us plenty of time to catch up. So we're not really concerned about file-format changes.

InfoWorld: In your opinion, where did other companies that have tried to compete with Microsoft miss the boat?

Rhie: I would say Corel and Microsoft and everybody else has the right idea, but just nobody has the right combination of things to finally strike a market chord. So what is that chord? First of all, a Web-based solution has to be small, fast, scalable, work offline, and be perfectly compatible with the past. If you look at what Corel offered; well, first of all it doesn't look like Microsoft, but more important than that, it's huge, slow, buggy, and has no feature set. So who wants to use it? There's a reason why they couldn't come to that optimal set. The reason is, analogy-wise, a Mack Truck designer can never design a Ferrari. The mind-set and attitude for the dimensions and requirements are very different. The reason that so many small things only come out of Japan is because of the mind-set, attitude, and the design philosophy of the people in that country.

InfoWorld: So who built the Thinkfree application suite?

Rhie: My programmers were used to 64K of memory running on small processors and writing applications in the assembly language.

There's a small company in Asia called Haansoft that was the Word Perfect of South Korea. They owned 95 percent of the market before Microsoft started hitting. So when they got hit three years ago, they started a Java project, Java Office project. They decided to spin that off, turning it into another company called JSoft for Java, which I have since reorganized -- about a year ago -- by giving it new vision, money, and management. That has now become ThinkFree.com. We have about 85 people, more than a half a million lines of code that's tightly coded. My coders are proud of the fact that they could squeeze more features in less lines of code over time than your typical C programmer can.

InfoWorld: What comes next?

Rhie: The next step is to make our service more robust. Frankly, it still feels like it's a prerelease, a little bit. We've got bugs and there is some combination of platforms that we are not terribly good at, so we could optimize a little more. So there are some tweaking optimizations to do, and we want to add some more capabilities. For example, today what we have is what we call Standard Edition, which as a service comes with advertising and 20MB of free space. We have introduced a business edition, scheduled for this summer that will not have ads, that will have 100MB of space and a collaboration capability. Then there will be the enterprise edition after that.

InfoWorld: So at the end of the day, how will this lower costs?

Rhie: As you know, a typical large organization spends about $15,000 per desktop per year. Much of that has to do with software installation, maintenance, and upgrades. In a new kind of centrally hosted environment, when it comes to applications, the cost is almost zero. Any time you log in, you check to see if your check sum is correct; you repair the binary if you need to; you upgrade the binary if you need to. The whole total cost of ownership is almost zero.

Michael Vizard is InfoWorld's Editor-in-Chief