The Future of SaaS, and What Puts ThinkFree Ahead of Google

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ThinkFree is way cool! I signed up for an account earlier this week, and its web-based spreadsheet, word processor and slide presentation apps work beautifully. TJ Kang, the company's founder, has been developing office productivity software since the 1980s, and it shows.

Founded in 1999. ThinkFree spent its early years as a desktop software company. Its online edition was released in April 2005. Now the LA Library offers it on 2,200 computers across 71 branches, and NHN, a Korean telco with 20 million subscribers, has integrated the product with its email system. In addition, over 250,000 individual users have signed up for accounts.

Unlike Zoho, which offers an amazing breadth of hosted services, ThinkFree focuses on three applications - but makes them available in more forms than you can imagine. Let's count them:

1. The ThinkFree-hosted edition

2. The server edition (for self-hosting by enterprise customers and on-premise hosting by telco and ISP partners)

3. The iPod edition (so that you can travel with your sales presentation, but not your computer)

4. The USB edition (which allows you to edit documents on someone else's computer without leaving any trace of your work after you disconnect)

5. The upcoming premier edition (which allows synchronized online/offline document editing), and

6. The also upcoming SMB edition (which allows companies to create groups for different sets of employees to share different documents).

All of the above offer round trip compatibility with Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint.

But I think what makes ThinkFree really, truly awesome is the company's idea of what SaaS should be like. VP Marketing Jonathan Crow says that one of his most important priorities is DocExchange, a shared repository of user-submitted documents. Because there's more to online collaboration than sharing documents with people you already know. It's also about leveraging and building upon the enormous amount of collective knowledge out there - knowledge that would have been inaccessible without SaaS.

One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers. Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)

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Comment by Anonymous on Friday, March 09, 2007

Isabel, a great article about the change that web hosting industry really needs.

But I am starting to be confused. Should I go with:
- Zoho - wide product portfolio
OR
- ThinkFree - unique delivery methods (I especially appreciate the Server Edition)
OR
- Google Apps - due to Google's resources a potential web/virtual office standard
???

Comment by Anonymous on Friday, March 09, 2007

Great article!!!

I'm a big fan of ThinkFree's new Viewer stuff which allows bloggers and webmasters place docs, spreadsheets and presentations (whether MS Office or TF) online without the need for Office or a plugin.

Here's one example:
http://www.briansolis.com/2007/03/social-media-takes-center-stage.html

Here's a link to their Viewer generator:
http://viewer.thinkfree.com

Comment by Anonymous on Sunday, March 11, 2007

Jan - You should check all three out! :) This isn't like web hosting, where you can't simultaneously host the same site at DreamHost and iPowerWeb. You can easily import/export the same document info different services, depending on your requirements at any given time. For instance, Jonathan and I discussed how Google Docs' strength is real time collaboration (several people can edit a doc together - while chatting via GTalk), while ThinkFree focuses on more formal authoring scenarios in which one person at a time would review a document. And last but not least, Zoho greatest strength is the seamless integration between its multiple apps. You could create embed parts of spreadsheets in slide presentations, compose sales letters that pull data fro CRM records, set up wikis that refer to dynamically updated documents, etc.

Brian - Awesome slides! I still think SlideShare has a friendlier interface for sharing slides (embeddable, shows related docs from other contributors, etc), but I definitely do see the advantage of being able to reuse shared docs on the spot.

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