Thursday, February 01, 2007
Revisiting Zoho
Zoho's announcement of their new Notebook service at Demo 07 made me take another quick look at their suite of online applications.
They've maturued nicely since I last looked - their word processor, spreadsheet and presentation apps all load cleanly and work properly on Opera, even if they do take a while to load (longer than Microsoft Office takes to start). What really disappointed me though is that there's still no consistent user interface between each of the applications. Each looks totally different, and often works differently, to the others. It's nothing like the consistent interface presented by, say, MS Office. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for Zoho to work on this and it would be a big step forwards.
On the utility of online apps generally, my views remain largely the same. They're great for people who have internet access and need to do the occasional wordprocessing or (say) accounting, or for accessing documents when away from your own machine (perhaps the one you're using doesn't have Office installed).
But for any serious work local applications still rule, especially Office 2007. And there's nothing wrong with that.
They've maturued nicely since I last looked - their word processor, spreadsheet and presentation apps all load cleanly and work properly on Opera, even if they do take a while to load (longer than Microsoft Office takes to start). What really disappointed me though is that there's still no consistent user interface between each of the applications. Each looks totally different, and often works differently, to the others. It's nothing like the consistent interface presented by, say, MS Office. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for Zoho to work on this and it would be a big step forwards.
On the utility of online apps generally, my views remain largely the same. They're great for people who have internet access and need to do the occasional wordprocessing or (say) accounting, or for accessing documents when away from your own machine (perhaps the one you're using doesn't have Office installed).
But for any serious work local applications still rule, especially Office 2007. And there's nothing wrong with that.
// posted by Dan @ 3:56 pm 
