Serial (or parallel?) entrepreneur and Linspire founder Michael Robertson announced a new shot over Microsoft’s bow today: a general purpose Ajax application platform called ajaxLaunch.com, with its first application, ajaxWrite, a web based word processing application that can read and write Word files and do WYSIWIG formatting.
This is a pretty damned impressive application on first glance. I showed Lisa at breakfast and she said, “Hmm,” obviously not too excited. Then I told her that it was web based and she said “You’re kidding.”
It’s not perfect, particularly in reading Word docs. Complex Word docs, including documents built on Word’s default letters templates, or even straightforward multi-page documentation with tables and different formats, are readable but the formatting is messed up. Several docs I imported came in all centered.
But, of course, this is a web based application, and the thing about web applications is that you can ship upgrades any day, as opposed to every three years.
It’s still early days for this, but seeing ajaxWrite makes me think that maybe this Web 2.0 business is really real. The only question is: what’s the revenue model? Om Malik has the same question.