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.
