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March 09, 2006
Writeup on Writely
I had a conversation with a friend exactly six months ago to the day that went something like this:
[me] Take a look at Writely... this could be BIG... zero client install... collaboration Sharepoint style, etc etc.
[him] What is the big deal? MS Word dominates the market and hosting a word processor on the web is not interesting
...
The conversation ended with "Time will tell". I honestly thought at the time... "yep time will tell, and I predicate that within 2 years that Writely will be acquired for at least 10 million". Well... it turned out to be six months! Writely announced today after a round of rumors that they will be aquired by Google (see Google announcement here). I haven't heard the price tag, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was north of 10M.
A couple things about this acquisition. First although this may put some pressure on Microsoft, it is interesting that Writely is implemented using .Net so presumably the server is a Windows box. As Google continues to acquire interesting companies the technology choices for their army of developers will expand. Today their primary languages are C++, Python, and Java [1]; tomorrow though it will likely be a mix of everything including C# and Ruby (note they bought a Ruby on Rails company just a few weeks ago).
This acquisition also supports their policy of hiring through acquisition. I am not sure about the rest of the team, but Steve Newman definitely appears to be a hardcore hacker. Check his profile here at TopCoder. While there is more to software development that simply cranking out Algorithms etc. this is certainly an objective metric for programming prowess; and cranking up a rating of 2985 there is hard-core. If you don't think so enter a few of the TC competitions and see where you end up.
Congrats to the Writely team... you built a quality product that can only get better with the support of Google. Plus, your IQ will probably go up a couple points just from all the good food!! :-)
[1] see Python at Google
Update: Russell Beattie had a GREAT post about the acquisition!!
Posted by harris at March 9, 2006 10:19 PM