Plugging to the original app is better solution, I think. Following the scenario, our company creates an IE browser collaboration app so users can collaboratively watch youtube or hulu movies with each other. The link: http://www.toponode.com. It’s the first youtube collaboration tool ever have.

my company, Markzware just released a stand-alone, desktop search and content extraction product, PageZephyr. It doesn’t need the native application.

Innovating startups like DocVerse look interesting at first. However, we are dealing with a land grab here and the big three or four players out there will be where the real competition is.

Some people scoff at Google because they aren’t “Enterprisey” – but they are building up their product set very fast and will be feature-by-feature competitive with the other big players soon, if not already. One thing Google knows is the web; the “traditional” IT players are fighting them on their own turf.

@Nick – I don’t think DocVerse is *really* competing with Microsoft, as much as they are hoping to be acquired. So many start-ups are simply a technical “proof of concept” of a very narrow use case that is simply too ingenious/audacious for the larger vendors to self-innovate. In the same vein, they don’t have the legs to stand on their own. Business model?

Until GDocs gets those features, it doesn’t matter how free it is.

If there are people who haven’t even upgraded Office 2000 to Office 2003, much less to get up to Office 2007 (which have MORE features and perform FASTER than the predecessors), one can be assured that the transition to a completely different product like Google Docs will happen much more slowly, especially given that it only offers a microscopic portion of what Office provides.

Again- that’s not to say that a trend toward web based collaboration is not happening. Our view is that desktop editing and web editing are actually complementary, not substitutes, in the same way that people access email through their desktops sometimes and through the browser sometimes.

On your specific comment about a traditional shared file area, we agree with you that there is such a need. We have plans on our roadmap for this type of functionality, but our goal is to first create the best experience at the point of authoring and sharing a document. Most tools in this space start with solving the problem you described above, but ultimately become unwieldy because they don’t take into account the fact that most people start by creating documents on their desktop.

Cheers
Shan

Thanks so much.

Side note to Henry, thanks for the recommendation! tried hibernater.com and it is quite a nice app.

but one fundamental problem will fully-hosted apps is that browser code lacks horsepower – google spreadsheets grind to a halt with a one-year P&L. if javascript can’t deliver, then the DocVerse approach will have a good run

@lazysupper – all companies have an issue with costs – the larger the co, the sharper they are at leaning on them, and not just in a recession. talk to any vendor…

@shan – looks good. one essential thing missing from most of these apps/services is a traditiional shared file area – where a business can set up a set of hierarchical folders and documents that various groups of people have access to. searching (google docs) is not enough – businesses need to be able to centrally manage a folder structure that everyone sees

-ben