Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Last time I checked, if you want an office suite, you can buy MS Office
> or...
> 
> ...uh, yeah, exactly. It's not that MS Office is good enough that nobody
> will pay to switch. It's that there's nothing to switch *to*. Like I
> say, MS carefully arranges it so that users have no alternatives. That
> way they don't have to waste money on, say, making a product that people
> want to use.

I was reading the Wikipedia article on real-time multi-user text editors, 
and it was a bit disturbing.

"a product called Writely saw explosive user growth and was bought by Google 
in March 2006 (now called Google Docs & Spreadsheets). It provides 
simultaneous edits on the entirety of a document, though changes from other 
users are only reflected after the client program polling the server."

"Another early web-based solution was JotSpotLive, in which line-by-line 
simultaneous editing was available in near-realtime. However, after Google's 
purchase of parent company JotSpot in November 2006, the site was closed."

"EtherPad was the first web editor to provide a smooth, character-by-
character real-time performance, something that previously was only 
available in desktop editors. [...] EtherPad was subsequently acquired by 
Google, which allocated the EtherPad team to work within the Wave project."

What's next? Hiring the entire 0x539.de dev group so they stop working on 
Gobby? (*open source* realtime editor)

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