Not long for this Word

Is the end of the Word at hand? Microsoft Word, that is.

While it is certainly too early to pre-write a celebrity obit, the era of the Big Box word processor may by fading into oblivion. Or, in the terms of the Hippie culture, "Why pay for it when it's free, man?"

Several new developments are no doubt generating flop sweats in Redmond. One is a surprisingly full-featured open-source word processor called AbiWord. For one, it's free. Nada. Download it, install it, get to work. The whole process of downloading and installing it took not significantly more time, and this is the truth, than launching MS Word on my Intel Mac. A 9mb download (on broadband, that's an eyeblink - as small as a single song from iTunes), double-click the icon, drag to applications, and there you go. And for that you get a full-featured word processor, does decent page layouts and web layouts. All the goodies - headers and footers, endnotes, footnotes, spellcheck, tables - all the stuff from Word you use and none of the junk you don't. Try it out, for Mac OS X, Unix, and if you must, Windows. If there's one downside, it's the ugly icons. If anyone wants to break into the open-source developer community and come up with some decent icons for AbiWord, I'm sure they would appreciate it! I know I would.



But more significantly, an evolution in the web-based productivity tools has real potential. I've been a fan of Google docs, and more recently, Zoho Writer, for awhile now. Both are decent word processors in their own right, but the fact that they are browser-based (read "free"), track revisions, and allow for concurrent multiple users to collaborate takes them to a level that dedicated applications such as MS Word haven't gotten to yet.

One drawback, of course, has been that if you are not online, you can't work on your docs. Enter Google Gears. Gears is a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to work on your documents offline, and they then sync when you reconnect. The process is almost seamless. Install Gears, create a document in Zoho Writer, then choose Go Offline and up to 25 documents are available to you offline. Unlike the "Save as..." option you've always had, working offline keeps the Writer interface, document list and so on, and automatically syncs the documents when you reconnect.

So, you're working in your office, click "Go Offline," haul your laptop to the airport, work on the docs on the plane, and then sync online when you get to the next WiFi hotspot. Sweet.

Now, wonder if it works with my iPod touch...

--Brad