Office is THE standard. Everyone buys a computer just for MS office – one reason why parent’s see a need to buy a computer for their son or daughter.

And office will be pirated if not available. Trust me on this.

So if office is standard on a lot of computers, it makes little sense to bring it on the web – and if web office was a huge success, then MS would copycat it – destroying your market.

Everyone wants to steal market share from MS’s core bread & butter software suites, but you have to give people a real incentive to try out alternatives.

My idea? Learn from microsoft, and develop a vertical stack of products that work _very_ well together which includes a web office app.

Because Office is a low level-old stuff program:

- It’s fast.
- It’s responsible.
- It’s a quality program.(I use Linux , Word is one of Microsoft’s best products,if not the best, they bought it and what makes it good was created before MS doing bad software.
- It’s free if you pirate it(people do it).
- It could be networked(a la google earth, traditional software with network connection).
- I want to be able to connect with friends word DIRECTLY, without anyone else in the middle. A lot of people are with me in this.

Today web programming is crap (sorry for this word, but represents reality):
- It’s slow.
- It’s buggy.
- Depends on servers processing.
- My documents are not their business.

You know, when people talk about traditional software problems they argue:
- It’s difficult and complex programming.
- It’s very slow to program.

MS don’t have this problem, the software is already done.

I think office competition is impossible, MS Office with a lot of people a lot of years effort is going to be better office than you, only doing things very radically different from word could do it. Then you won’t be competing with anyone.

This is the marketting credo, forget about the product, focus on the need. It should be a need not satisfied from MS.

Barring a big payday, revenue could come once the product has traction by offering custom versions specifically for companies and/or using a freemium model to pay for extra features (such as offline access, templates, support SLAs, etc..). In this space, though, you would really need to make some big upfront investments, this isn’t one of those “cash positive on day one” type of ventures.

B – Those are all file sharing sites, no? My idea is more around creating a standard online Office suite that targets the college demographic as a way to build a user base and differentiate from existing offerings in this space. I actually disagree with the “little sense of ethics” comment – smart students know that it doesn’t really make sense to cheat as you’re the one who is paying to learn (and your college GPA is basically worthless in the long run anyway). Those who don’t get that are going to find a way to cheat anyway, and that’s really not who I’m targeting here.